animats

February 9

Details are in http://animats.com/sl/misc/ where there is an annotated Firestorm log, "Firestorm-lognotes.txt" This requires a password to access, and the people working on this know what it is. More shortly.

February 9

I think I've figured this out. And it's very funny.

The short version: The sim side is broken, but viewers have a workaround for the breakage, so you don't see this. Mostly.

Details to follow.

February 8

3 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

So you're main point is basically that LL should stop further development of Belli in favor of mainland, because everything is there already?

No, it's simply that the niche markets are already addressed by others. There's some minimum size for a viable themed area in Bellesaria, and it's probably more than a thousand homes.

February 8

3 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I think you meant Cool VL Viewer (as I explained in the above post)... You keep confusing the two viewers names (you already did in your Canny issue), which is strange... 🤪

Sorry!

February 8

On 1/27/2024 at 12:56 PM, Monty Linden said:

Simulator has a lot of conditional code and some of that is conditioned on what you would normally think is an unrelated sub-system.

Yes, there are things connected to other things that should not be.

I just found and fixed a bug in Sharpview that applied only to the Other Simulator. The third region crossing always failed. The first two were fine.

It took about a week to find the cause. An admin of a grid for the Other Simulator set up some test regions for me, and gave me access to the sim-side logs. With my own viewer-side logs plus the sim-side logs, it was possible to diagnose the problem.

The viewer sends some info about how fast it is able to accept data from the simulators. That's what the "bandwidth" slider controls. I used larger values than usual for Sharpview, because, with all the concurrency, it's able to accept updates faster. Networks go much faster today than they did when that code was written, so larger bandwidth numbers are appropriate.

The throttle values sent to the simulator are floating point numbers. In the Other Simulator, they are converted into an integer without an overflow check or clamping. This can result in an integer overflow in 32 bits. The result is a negative number. Once we saw that negative number in a log, the problem was clear. The throttling system sees that negative number, throttles the message traffic down to zero bandwidth, and the viewer seems to freeze, since updates have stopped.

SL sims do not have that problem, by the way. Cranking up the numbers results in faster region loading, if the viewer can handle it. Black Dragon uses larger values than most other viewers.

This was easy to fix once understood. It's already fixed in both Sharpview and the dev version of the Other Simulator. The devs there have been very cooperative.

I suspect that when we finally find the EstablishAgentCommunication bug, it will turn out to be something irrelevant like that. All the relevant stuff has already been tried.

February 8

The people proposing ideas here need to go visit some of the better-run estates in SL. Visit the Chung operations, the Fruit Islands, Second Norway, the Grove Estates, New Babbage, and the Confederation of Democratic Simulators. See what's working. There are many people quietly living the good life in SL and not in Bellessaria.

February 8

1 hour ago, Jadziyah Nova said:

"Well, we still have to get people to live there"

It's really hard to design a livable futuristic house. A competition for architecture students would be a good way to explore that. They'd have to design houses which would then be rented out, and after a month or so, the occupants would rate them.

February 7

On 12/16/2023 at 11:54 AM, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

In theory you could do it in the next 512m plot. Ste them all side by side in small blocks.

A given region would have 2-4 "city blocks" with 20 houses (current 20 seems the norm in other themes).

Around the block are lots of streets.

No front yard (or ultra tiny paved lot). A small backyard. Behind that a narrow alley.

Done like houses in San Francisco or what I have seen of pictures of English Council homes.

First image is San Francisco, second is somewhere in England that turned up in search of this (purposefully going for less attractive looking examples here):

What you lose:

no space on the sides, no front yard. It's intentionally visually unappealing for the 'grungy' look.

What you gain:

alley ways, sidewalks, likely driveways, a sense of being urban.

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

February 7

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.

February 5

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.

February 5

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.)

February 4

2 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

Dead serious response: BelliBins are real and yes, you use the blue ones for recycling (and the yellow ones for your toxic waste, orange for bio waste, green for yard debris)

Sad but true response (almost cries):

Well, years ago we made the very reasonable request to "the powers that be" to award the esteemed Bellisseria Deptartment of Solid Waste (and not-solid waste) an ENTIRE region for use as a landfill. Note that we were being VERY VERY scientific as Belli has tons of waste and a 256x256m region hardly seems sufficient to contain it. We used as precedent the fact that the Bellisserria Bureau of Bureaucracy or whatever those SLACKERs call themselves get a whole region to themselves... not fair (sobs). This egregious misallocation of resources has left the BDSW demoralized. It's a tragedy.

To add injury to insult, it seems that the marvelous HUD used to collect trash has been broken for a while and not a peep from anyone. I was able to bribe a techy kid down the street to fix it and it (BelliFind HUD ) is being bulk redelivered as we write/read. Some joy amongst the sadness.

Nice.

discardedxmastree3.png.02439d3304aaef535

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.

February 3

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?

February 3

On 2/1/2024 at 11:36 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:

We are the creators, we bring things into the world and no amount of effort I can imagine would have a new virtual world with even a tiny fraction of all of the amazing (and weird) custom content available to SL residents. Unless it's a totally open world that allows us to bring what we like, and then also provide a MP to sell it, I just can't see it. That's point one.

Point two is related. Part of the appeal of SL is it's openness. Other corporate entities severely restrict the people, what they can do etc. We self police as well, making sure the most egregious and potentially illegal stuff is removed and monitored while allowing for a huge range of activities otherwise that most corp entities will shudder at. Without that, again, I can't see an alternative.

Last. Related to the above two. Sex. In all it's messy, weird, edgy, taboo, sensual, vanilla, and [insert your own kink/fetish here] glory. Without letting people be people, and that involves physical intimate fun, other platforms would struggle to survive this long. It can not be especially realistic here at time with regards to SLex, but the range of what you can get up to would not at all be tolerated by 99.9% of corporations. I don't need to point out some of the more taboo stuff and "right on the edge of permissible" that goes on (all usually self policed again) but I can't imagine anyone else taking the apparent risks that happen in SL.

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.

February 2

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

quite dim

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.

February 1

8 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

It would be a bottomless money sink for the company before it would even reach a tenth of what SL is today.

As Meta Horizon demonstrated, by expending somewhere in the US$20 billion range to produce a dud metaverse.

10 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

The drawback is that each time LL wants to improve SL, they must take into account legacy contents to avoid breaking it at all price

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.)

February 1

4 hours ago, Riodan said:

Ultimately, I ask these questions because I happen to do a good bit of development in Unreal Engine, and I know of several places with solid prototypes for virtual worlds already in development. Before it gets asked, no I can't tell you who, or give you any details on what I do know, it would be ethically wrong as I've known a few people in the industry for years and won't betray the trust they've given me as a professional courtesy.

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.

January 31

2 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

How about one separate Moderate region with a dance club, a roleplay hub, and links to Adult sims and and venues? Maybe call it "SL After Dark"?

Now that's a good idea. Ease people into it.

2 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

sponsors of Motown pull the plug

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.)

January 31

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

It's not obvious to me how SL's "adult content" is best represented for newcomers...

The Lab probably should also separately show that Adult content is acceptable here, neither appearing to sweep it under the rug nor force it in the face of those with other interests.

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.

January 31

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

January 29

52 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

so get an alt and seat the alt on your giant mega yacht, then you will be able to stand and walk around your giant mega yacht. understand however, that we have alt monitors and they expect all such alts to have beautiful mesh bodies, a full price mesh head, with beautiful clothes, hair, makeup and breast physics.... gotta keep up appearances

Been visiting Siren's Isle on the Blake Sea?

January 29

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.

January 28

21 hours ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

Rust should be able to do it out of the box with:

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.

21 hours ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

Btw. did someone ever create a proper Wireshark Dissector for the SecondLife protocol?

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.

January 27

1 hour ago, Monty Linden said:

If you ask for a full set of caps regardless of whether you need them or now, you might see different behavior.

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.

January 27

36 minutes ago, Monty Linden said:

One thing I didn't expect to see in the Apache log was a 200 with a 0-length body to event-get.

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.

47 minutes ago, Monty Linden said:

A recommendation since you're chin-deep in protocol... look into getting the key log information out of the TLS support in the Rust crate doing the crypto. You'll be able to decode the https: stream and persist the decode and this may be necessary for more digging. And it's the only way to do inspection in the modern TLS world.

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.

49 minutes ago, Monty Linden said:

Quick question: it looks like you're asking for very few caps in the initial seed request. Far fewer than the SL viewer. Is this correct?

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.

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