animats

A good start would be to have a game development creator group. Invite some of the Lindens. There needs to be some back and forth between what's possible in the SL architecture and what's needed for basic gaming. Bear in mind that SL used to be bigger than Roblox. Gamers do provide a large pool of prospective SL users. And they tend to have machines with reasonably powerful GPUs. I'm neither a serious gamer nor a game dev, so I won't say much about what gamers need. Everyone agrees that performance is a problem, of course. We'll see how much the "performance viewer" helps. It's good to see LL management on this, after years of neglect.

Elizabeth Jarvenen explained to me how planar mapping is supposed to work. She showed me how Substance Painter does it right. Here's a paper on the theory. There's single planar mapping, which is like illuminating something with a projected pattern along one axis. That's how land textures work in SL, and it's why steep slopes look so bad. Then there's triaxial planar mapping, where the object is illuminated along all three axes, from both directions. That's hard to do and usually requires special shaders in the GPU. So, is that feature actually used? Yes. I've found it twice in New Babbage. Savory Street Market, Port Babbage. Across from the docks. Rendered with Animats renderer, not a standard viewer. The bays on the facade use planar texture projection. The top, front, and sides of the bay are all one SL face. So this needs triaxial planar projection. Notice that the stonework texture is lines instead of stone blocks on the top and front side, but correct on the angled faces. This works in the LL renderer and Firestorm. I'm surprised that it does, after seeing what the LL renderer does with other hard cases. My renderer only has single planar mapping, and that's not enough. I have to handle the hard cases. Still much to do, but getting there. This doesn't come up often. The only other place I've seen it is the cockpit windows of the Albatross, the sky ship permanently parked above Babbage Palisade alongside the railroad track to The Fells. If you know of other places, please let me know, and I'll go look. Planar mapping tends to be used on large surfaces, so, when it's a problem, it shows. In SL, we're used to looking at blur in close-up. Once that's fixed, as it is in my viewer, and textures go to high resolution before you get close enough to see blur, problems like this stand out more. (Is that fixed in the "performance viewer"?)

It's clear that Roblox now has the technology to reach SL's level of realism. They've chosen not to use it everywhere, but it's available. There's an argument for not making avatars fully photorealistic. The Ready Player Me people have a paper on this. They went all the way to photorealistic, then backed off to about the SL classic avatar level. It's a stylistic decision.

They're trying to compete with Roblox, which has a market cap of US$45 billion. Pay attention to what Roblox R&D is doing. They're working on all the hard technical problems. Seamless big world, making clothing fit automatically, big groups of players in one area. All the weak points in SL that LL can't fix. Their CEO is a physicist. I met him years ago, when he headed Knowledge Revolution, a tiny startup in San Francisco that sold a physics engine. Peak concurrent Roblox users: 5.7 million. Yes, average age 14. They still have more adult users than SL does.

Send a note to Linden Lab support. At least it will be on the record.

LL officially announced that something like this was coming. It's not my proposal. LL hasn't announced yet how this new feature is supposed to work, so it's useful to see how other systems do it.

With Linden Lab having promised camera-based tracking to make avatars more expressive as a new feature this year, here are some comments from someone who tried Microsoft's new system for expressiveness: "Something strange happens to me when I enter virtual worlds with my VR headset: I feel alone. I've noticed this happens again and again, no matter what virtual space I stumble into. The irony of feeling so disconnected despite the promise of endless ways to connect isn't lost on me. But that changed recently. Standing in a bare virtual room created in AltspaceVR, along with two other actors and with Jeff Wirth, director of the interactive acting-focused Interactive PlayLab and my VR coach, I found something far more uplifting. We stood close to each other, paying attention to when our avatar eyes drifted, an automatic move created by Microsoft's virtual worlds app to simulate eye contact without eye tracking. We learned to move our heads to trigger this eye movement and more intentionally create a sense of presence. Wirth also reminded me that, as I spoke, my hands stayed too still. Moving my hands more, and animating, made my avatar more expressive. I had to learn to perform, in a sense, to better express myself as a human." Now that's an interesting way to do avatar expressiveness. This bears thinking about. This could solve SL's problem of rooms full of dead-looking people standing around.

Make sure you have the object set to "prim" physics rather than "convex hull". Convex hull mode shrink-wraps a collision volume around the entire object, filling all holes. "Prim" mode is whatever the maker of the object set up. If you rez the wall in a sandbox, set it to prim mode, and still can't walk through the door, contact the seller and demand a refund.

Ah. Here's a tutorial on house physics. 2017, though. SL hasn't changed much, but Blender has.

There are things I'd like to see on Marketplace long before "dark mode". Bigger pictures. Mouse over picture, it gets bigger and the description appears. Like most other shopping sites today. Discourage excessive text in pictures. Display only ads from the relevant category. Remove dead "See object in world" links automatically. Let sellers group and prioritize their items.

Great! That's covered by the "land cutting" policy. "In general residents are welcome to subdivide larger parcels of land that they occupy into smaller parcels. Subdivision is considered "land cutting" when a resident extensively subdivides land into smaller parcels for the purpose of further "renting" or "selling" those parcels — and it is not allowed. Other prohibited land cutting includes subdividing land in a manner that decreases the ability of other residents to enjoy their land, collaborate and/or exercise land-management controls, or in a way that constitutes harassment of another resident. Linden reserves the right to make parcel alternations as necessary to ensure residents’ enjoyment of Second Life. We want to keep Second Life beautiful too. We therefore may, in our sole discretion, move any parcel of land that is smaller than or equal to 128 sqm where such land is interfering with the enjoyment of a significantly larger parcel of land or region."

I was really bored during coronavirus lockdown. I had to do something. Now I've come far enough I don't want to quit until I get something others can play with.

Yes. And although you don't know in advance what's going to change, you can observe what does change. I do that in my experimental viewer. Everything starts out static. If it moves or changes, it's moved to "dynamic". All the static objects are divided into tiles (currently 16 tiles per region) and handled, to some extent, as a group. Dynamic objects get individual attention. This is in the early stages; it's not working yet. I previously posted some images from GTA V to show where they transition from 3D models to flat background impostors. That's the effect I'm looking for. That's how GTA gets those impressive vistas. SL has impressive vistas, especially in Heterocera and the Snowlands, but unless you turn up draw distance to 1024m and wait several minutes, you'll never see them. Like this: Heterocera, from the ridgeline in Lota. That's Heterocera's central island in the distance. The Unknown Park amusement park is to the left of center. Taken with Firestorm, draw distance and LOD at max, which slows Firestorm down to 3.5 FPS. My goal is to have views like that all the time. Most of the distant scenery would be coming from static images collected once a week or so by a picture-taking bot.

I agree on world objects and disagree on clothing. As I've mentioned occasionally, I'm working on an experimental viewer that uses Rust, Vulkan, and many threads. Region objects are not a big problem in terms of viewer load with modern graphics programming and hardware. Most objects are far away, and thus can be dealt with. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. Seaport in New Babbage. Experimental Vulkan PBR rendering. Currently testing shinyness. Too shiny. No environment effects yet, so the scene is too bright and clear for New Babbage. (This is a long way from release. It's an experimental project of mine to see if this approach can work. It depends on lower layer rendering libraries, Rend3 and WGPU, which are not yet finished.) Clothing, though. The sheer number of triangles is out of control, and the LOD system for avatars is totally broken. Automatic optimization when you get dressed is needed. All the triangles hidden by clothing need to go away. LODs need to be generated. If Roblox can do it...

I'm a bit more hopeful since Mojo Linden came on board as VP of engineering. He's been emphasizing performance, and the "performance viewer" is now in test. Asset loading should speed up, and there are some speedups to rendering. It's incremental improvement which should have been done long ago. At Server User Group, we're hearing more about Lindens looking at server logs for specific times to chase down performance bugs. This is progress. There's a lot that can be done within the existing Second Life/Open Simulator architecture. There's nothing better out there yet for a big world with large amounts of user content. I'd expected, with all the metaverse hype, that someone would develop something. So far, nobody has. Roblox is making progress. It helps having a market cap of over US$40 billion and over ninety development teams. I've been encouraging some of the Lindens to look at their clothing system. They've solved the "clothing Just Fits" problem for layered mesh. Even for wildly different avatars. No more need for "alphas". In their system, when you change clothes, clothing gets stretched outward or pushed inward as needed to make it fit. Their exact solution isn't directly applicable to SL, but it shows how to approach the problem of tweaking rigged mesh to make it fit properly. SL needs to be an automatic fit adjustment phase that happens when you put on a mesh clothing item. Like an improved Bakes on Mesh that generates combined meshes, just as Bakes on Mesh generates combined textures. This would eliminate most SL clothing disasters. (Spend time at a new user help point, and you'll find that the two big questions are "What do I do now?", and "How do I fix this &$#! clothing problem?") Epic has "big" figured out. Unreal Engine 5 has finally been fully released. You can now download the Matrix demo, and drive around 16 square kilometers of highly detailed city. Requires a rather high performance PC for the dev tools. For those who have suitable hardware, it's worth trying. Epic, though, has not solved user-created content yet. Their whole approach relies on a development environment where entire levels are heavily optimized long before gameplay. This isn't a good match to SL's user created content. So that's what the multi-billion dollar players are doing. A common theme is that there's a step between the content creator and the content user where automated optimization takes place. SL lacks that step, which is why bad content can impact performance so much.

Salt Gulch region. Part of Racer's Gulch 4-sim area. Easy off-road track through four regions. Takes about one minute per lap. Rez zone near the starting line. This is part of the premium-only area west of one of the old Linden Homes continents. There are two sandboxes, each with four regions. Orville, the little airport for testing seaplanes. Arowana, a circular island with a boat rez zone. (Arowana is a region with zero scripts running, which is useful for some tests.) Limia, a gas station for seaplanes. And Premium Voice Services, to which voice morphing users must make a monthly pilgrimage. One of those old, half-forgotten Linden builds.

There's a Linden off-road track region. It's in the premium destination guide.

What, not teleport them if they get the answer wrong? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

I've written about the technical issues before. The business problems are harder. This issue comes up regularly at Creator User Group. Second Life has a very old user base, and many users with old computers. There's great reluctance to cut them off. Especially since some of them are keeping builds alive and still paying tier. On the content creation front, there's growing agreement, including on the Linden side, that it's getting close to time to add the ability to upload new mesh content in GLTF as well as COLLADA. All the major tools (Blender, Maya, Substance Painter) import and export GLTF now. Unity and Unreal Engine speak GLTF. It's now the industry standard, and it's an open standard. On the workflow front, the idea is that you build and texture your new object in Blender/Maya, you upload it to SL, and all the parts arrive properly connected. The COLLADA uploader, for obscure reasons, can't upload a linkset without randomizing the link order, and while COLLADA is supposed to be able to upload textures, that never seems to work right. Also, when the time comes to move to physically-based rendering, the additional layers (metallic, roughness, subsurface scattering for skin, etc.) can be expressed in GLTF. COLLADA doesn't have slots for them. This improves workflow for creators. It doesn't do anything for the non-creator user.

Ah. It turns out that vacant area is two parcels under different ownership. The original poster was talking about the near half of this large vacant area. The far half is also for sale, by a different seller, at a higher price per square meter. When posting real estate ads, it helps to turn on the parcel boundaries.

The audience for that statement is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It should be read as "Linden Dollars are a utility token, not a security token, and thus don't have to be registered as a security offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission". It's LL trying to stay out of the kind of legal trouble that the cryptocurrency Initial Coin Offering people got into starting in 2019. A "utility token" is like the tokens you buy from the vending machine at the laundromat to operate the washing machines, and a "security token" is like buying a share of AT&T stock. Somewhere in between are Linden Dollars, SAND (used in Sandbox), and MANA (used in Decentraland). The last two are probably security tokens, and part of the Make Money Fast industry. Linden Lab wants to stay on the utility token side of the line. For more info, search for "SEC utility token" and "Howey Test". This is not really relevant to the problem being discussed here, which seems to be an ordinary customer service problem.

Looks like it's was resold Friday, and the new buyer is trying to flip it at L$49,152 (L$12.0m^2). About a quarter of the land in Kama City is vacant and for sale at comparable prices.

I'm encouraged that someone on the LL side is looking at logs at that level of detail. The rezzing problem is well known - things either rez very quickly or are delayed for 3 seconds. Forumilab has tests for this, and it really is bimodal. Good that someone is finally looking at this.

Recently, Roblox and Horizon have come under fire for having a capability for sex. VRchat has sex. Even Fortnite has sex. But none of those are on the Twitch banned list. Second Life is the only general purpose world banned from Twitch. This discrimination must be stopped. LL is in a strong position to negotiate with Twitch today. There's so much metaverse hype, and some of the big competitors in that space have worse problems than SL does.