animats

Solid-looking things you can walk through are immersion-breaking. You end up inside stuff, sometimes stuck. They make the world less real. Objects which look like land but can be walked through are most annoying. Simplify the physics model, don't eliminate it.

There's a whole advertising campaign in this. Not to the general public, but in the industry trade press and forums. That same copy, overlaid on good SL screenshots. Post that everywhere someone announces yet another metaverse.

LL: "Our Billing team is available from 6am to 2pm PST, Monday through Friday. Call toll-free in the US/Canada: 800-294-1067 or 703-286-6277"

No. It's a backwards compatibility feature. Originally, all prims had 1 LI. Then came mesh, and with it, the "new accounting system". To prevent breaking old items, classic prims are still 1 LI. But as soon as you use any fancy features, like materials, the "new accounting system" which involves counting triangles, takes over. If you link two things together, and one is on the new accounting system, the whole linkset gets charged LI according to the new accounting system. It's a pain, but it doesn't break existing content. Which was the whole point.

The official system requirements for SL are very, very low and haven't been updated in years. 1GB RAM is the official minimum requirement. Can you even boot Windows in 1GB any more? 4GB is "recommended". The official graphics card list is a joke: The NVidia 9000 series was introduced in 2008, and support was dropped in 2016. The Nvidia 200 series was introduced in 2009, and support was dropped in 2016. LL tries hard to support older systems. If you turn the graphics settings down to the lowest settings, it can still sort of work. But don't expect much. Incidentally, setting "number of non-impostor avatars" to something like 2 or 3 helps a lot around fancy avatars, and the big "quality" slider doesn't do that. (Beq's new Firestorm, though, does, I think. There's a new option under Advanced->Performance which turns fancier graphics features off until the frame rate comes up. Avatars today are often a much bigger overload problem than scenery, and the LL system was designed before mesh avatars.) What mostly goes wrong on an underpowered system is that the system can't keep up with the incoming stream of updates. Once the viewer falls behind, it starts dropping update messages. They get retransmitted a few times, then the server gives up. Then, with important messages being lost, things go downhill from there. That's why scene overload causes viewer disconnects. As Coffee points out, 8 GB of RAM and an SSD might get you acceptable performance. For comparison, here are the recommended system requirements for GTA V, which came out in 2013: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 64 Bit, Windows 8.1 64 Bit, Windows 8 64 Bit, Windows 7 64 Bit Service Pack 1 Processor: Intel Core i5 3470 @ 3.2GHz (4 CPUs) / AMD X8 FX-8350 @ 4GHz (8 CPUs) Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 660 2GB / AMD HD 7870 2GB Storage: 72 GB available space Sound Card: 100% DirectX 10 compatible That's a gamer PC from 9 years ago.

I've noticed at least three new places where you can buy unwanted gacha-type merchandise. There's one in southwest Kama City. These are SL's flea markets - all the really tacky stuff nobody wants.

Especially if you don't have an unlimited data plan. Really unlimited, not "unlimited" as a term of art in contracts that means a few gigabytes a month. Driving around SL will pull maybe 10 gigabytes per hour across the network. One two hour drive with Drivers of SL can blow through an entire monthly "unlimited" quota with some cellular providers.

I have knee-length board shorts for swimming, surfing, and sailing. A good swim attachment goes with that.

Can't mention the name of this street. The forum software got upset when it was mentioned in a discussion of Asian fashion. This is the famous center of Japanese cute. It's in Harajuku, Tokyo.

Another new user just reported this problem. They seemed quite upset that they could not go to their new premium home.They reported it as a problem with Safari, indicating a problem with Apple systems. When you're in the viewer and try to go to your Linden home, the viewer opens a browser window, which then offers you a link which is supposed to send your viewer to the desired location. So there's a handoff from the viewer to a browser and back to the viewer again. Lots of opportunities for something to go wrong there. Neecy1975, are you using an Apple computer? Useful hint for new users: when you really need help in Second Life, you can go to "Firestorm Social Island". That's a place which has experienced volunteer helpers for new users.

I think some of the crystals were recycled for the fantasy theme area of Bellessaria.

Ouch. You mean you can't find your Linden home? If you're stuck, try going to "Firestorm Social Island", where there is usually a helper on duty.

Trademark and copyright law are not that strong. There's a parody exception to copyright law, and trademark law does not protect editorial and comparative uses. LL may try to ask for more than that in their terms of service, but that may be overreach under the 2016 Consumer Review Fairness Act. That act prohibits trying to punish a customer for comments, negative or otherwise, or even putting a threat to do so in the terms of service.

I used to be really serious about steampunk. For years, I ran an elaborate telegraph office at Clockwork Alchemy, the California steampunk convention. Steampunk telegraph office, 2010-2019. Text in a message, and a messenger delivers it around the convention. Fully funtional antique machinery. Fully staffed and equipped telegraph office. That convention is this weekend, and I'm not going. It's a fad that's over. Been there, done that, and those two young actors are a decade older. I still go to New Babbage in SL, but there's seldom anyone there. It's awfully late to do a steampunk theme.

That's what the article in the Austin Chronicle, linked above, used.

So Philip Rosedale went to SXSW. (Which is like Davos for hipsters in tech.) Where there was, of course, a panel about the Metaverse. “No advertising!” exclaimed Rosedale. Yes, that’s the proper dialogue tag: The man was emphatic on that point, like a sort of handsome, more stylish Bernie Sanders. “I cannot say that enough – no advertising!” Good panel. They had Charlie Fink, who used to head Disney Feature Animation, someone from Epic, and someone from Ready Player Me, the avatar and clothing company. Nobody from NFT land. Anybody from LL speaking at GDC next week?

× From "Murder in the Zoo", 1933. Copenhagen zoo, 1930s.

On the education front, some of the problems are simply the ones that make meetings in SL a pain: Voice works badly. (Since LL acquired the spatial audio assets of High Fidelity, Vivox should be replaced at some point.) Presentations work badly. We need some kind of streaming facility so that you can show the same media screen to everybody in a room. This is possible now, but you have to set up a streaming server, which is a pain. Performance works badly. (The new performance viewers might help. Even now, if you have control over a region's assets, can limit your visitors' clothing complexity, and everybody has a good network connection, performance isn't a killer problem.) Onboarding works badly. The viewer is complicated. Group messaging works badly. Messages get lost. Fixing those problems would help.

Reasonable. Although consider Roblox, which is for kid game developers and their players. Average user age 13, although Roblox has more adults than SL does, due to its sheer size of 5.7 million peak concurrent users. They're moving towards an SL-type technology or better, with mesh avatars and objects, and with user building tools. There may be a mass market product somewhere in this space. Maybe. Yes. The Sansar model was that creators would create spaces which ordinary users would then briefly visit. All-time high concurrent user count, from Steam, was around 260. Sansar is still turned on, although as of 7 minutes ago, it had zero logged in users. Daily average is 4.4. This is also the model for SineSpace, which has user counts in 2 digits. However, SineSpace repurposed their technology to make Breakroom, which is a more business-oriented version of Sinespace intended for meetings. LL used to have Blocks World, their answer to Roblox. It, too, died a quiet death a few years ago. Over in NFT land, Decentraland peaked around 2000 concurrent users. 1185 right now. Despite all the hype, not many people go there. For those who don't know, SL's concurrent user count is in the 30,000-50,000 range, depending on time of day.

The southern tip of Satori is tough for travel. The water areas are private and have obstacles and ban lines. As far as you can go on the west coast of Satori. Even if you can get past the orb within 10 seconds, the rock wall goes all the way to the edge of the world. The roads in Satori stop before reaching the southern tip. Someone built a railroad to a dock at the southern tip, but it's not finished, and they apparently had to leave SL for health reasons. You can dock in Yeowler, walk the tracks to Bagheera, then walk from the station to Route 8, where there is a rez zone. South Satori RR. Unfinished, and no rez zones on the tracks, but SLRR standard guides are in place. So if you can get a train onto the track, it will run. Even trying to fly over south Satori is tough, due to aggressive security orbs and ban lines. The west coast of Satori has two 10-second security orbs and one no-warning orb.

It's a dead end. There are no other roads nearby to connect, and the land ahead is already developed. Many of us would like to see the unfinished mess east of Harriot and south of Kerano, Cotehill, Ratters, and Garland filled in. It looks awful. It leaves four roads disconnected. It's all raw edge from Jaraded to Lazonby Pass. It looks like some project was abandoned before completion.

I hope we get some new sounds. SL has an owl sound and a seagull sound that are reused so much as to be a cliche. Useful trick, from drum machines: If you have a repetitive sound, have three or four different versions. Play one at random, but never the same one twice in succession. I have a weathervane which does this. As the wind changes, it squeaks a bit as it moves, but never the same squeak twice in a row. This makes it sound much less repetitive.

A few points: That loop will take 400 seconds to execute. 0.8 second times 500 iterations. The shortest wait you can do is 1/45 second. That doesn't mean you'll always get control back after the timer runs out. Scripts share a rather limited amount of CPU time server side, and the scheduler will not let you hog that resource. While you can change the parameters of a prim over time, it's slow and high overhead. Each step of the loop transmits an update message across the network. Most eyeblinks in Second Life are done using animations on the eyelid "bones". This is a standard feature of most newer avatars. See https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Skeleton_Guide. If this is for an existing modern head, there are standard eyeblink animations available. Works great, low overhead, but setting up a new head for it is a big job.

Could we have a less brain-dead filter, please?

There are a few simple templates for standard items. There's Robin Wood's free T-shirt template. This gives you a blank T-shirt you can texture. You need Photoshop or GIMP to do this, because you start from a multi-layered image and change one or two of the layers. Most avatars can wear these T-shirts. Get that and practice a bit. There are other places which sell templates for more complex garments. Search for "second life clothing templates". In Second Life, there is ready to wear clothing, often not too expensive and often not copyable or not transferable. Then there are kits for creators. Those usually cost more, but usually come with permissions that let you copy and resell items built with the kit. You're looking for a product aimed at creators. This works kind of like real life.