animats

What the original poster asked for. It's at NTBI, just as an urban background. Vehicles are started from starting markers every few seconds. They zip down the road, and disappear at the end of their straight run. Each vehicle has a unique sound. They can push avatars, although it's not intended that anyone climb up here. NTBI also has a train. There's a train track, and, occasionally, a train goes by. A long train, far longer than a sim. Comes out of a tunnel at one end of the sim, and disappears into a tunnel at the other end. There are freight trains of different types, and, rarely, a passenger train. You might have to wait an hour for the next train. All this is probably keyframe animation, which is the most reliable way to get steady, smooth motion in SL.

I just put this into the Canny-based new Second Life issue system. Not sure if that does anything. There don't even seem to be BUG numbers in there.

After looking further, this doesn't seem to be timeout-related. When I try this at the region corner in Morris, I quickly get three EnableSimulator events in a row, which is correct. Then about four seconds later, after all the region handshake stuff is complete for three regions, I get only one EstablishAgentCommunication, for one of the three adjacent regions. Always the same one. All that happens within seconds of login. Polling hasn't had a chance to time out yet.

I've wanted that connection too. If the coastal parcels just east of Schell weren't private out to the water edge, it would be possible now. There's an alternate route. Gateway Airport is three regions to the east, and has a Linden road connection. If you have an amphibious vehicle, drive into Gateway Airport from the Linden road. It's a maze of ramps, terminals, and parking, and, despite signs, you will probably get lost at first. After driving down some ramps, you can reach a very large freight elevator which will take you down to water level. Drive your vehicle onto the elevator, but don't turn it off. Take the elevator down. Then you can, with difficulty, drive off the elevator onto a dock and into the water. You can then go, in boat mode, to Bellessaria, and find some beach where you can grind across land to a Linden road. Both M&S Automotive in Neumogen, and Larson Logistics, have suitable amphibious vehicles.

A bit more info. This has nothing to do with region corners. I've been trying along the edges of the Morris regions on the beta grid, out of draw range for the corners. I consistently get that one minute delay in Sharpview. For several fails, I've seen the following pattern from the event poller: Event EnableSimulator comes in successfully. My viewer starts the process of connecting to the region, and all the UDP stuff with region handshaking, etc. goes fine. The event poller in the viewer polls again, with a 90 second timeout. Exactly 30 seconds later, the event poller returns a transport error, "Connection aborted / Unexpected EOF". The viewer side polls again. Exactly 30 seconds after that, the event poller returns a 500 Internal Server Error status. The viewer side polls again. 2 seconds after that, a valid, but duplicate, EnableSimulator event comes in via the event poller. The viewer side polls again. One second after that, a valid EstablishAgentCommunication event comes in, providing the needed seed capability, and the viewer proceeds to request and get caps, after which the region goes live in the viewer. Success, one minute late. This now looks like an event poller bug. I'm probably seeing it because I have a totally different HTTP client than the C++ viewers do. Henri Beauchamp has reported shorter delays (see above) and strange delays of regions not appearing when expected are not unknown in other viewers. It's probably not just me. Monty Linden has looked at that poll reply code with suspicion. I think we're getting close. That 500 Internal Server Error is very suspicious. Who generates that? Apache? The sim itself?

Now that's a thought. Ban line enforcement is done by the sim servers, but ban line visibility is under the control of the viewer. It comes from the same parcel info the mini-map uses. Ban lines could be shown based on time to impact. If you're within a few seconds of hitting a ban line, show the ban line. That allows time for evasive action. An elegant solution would be to not show ban lines if there's a visible obstacle closer than the ban line. So if you neighbor has a fence, hedge, or wall, you'd never see their ban line unless you're flying.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Port Babbage/161/180/106 All the girls are working hard. The boss is watching. This is a Victorian-era match factory in New Babbage. The workers are girls who organized a union because the phosphorous matches were poisonous. It's a famous event in labor history. Go visit. There's a lot going on.

Here's a video of what this is all about. This is another Sharpview test run. https://video.hardlimit.com/w/77eo95FLSQF6waGuCtfPjV It's just driving around, and watching the one minute delay for regions to come live. It's sometimes possible to skip the delay by crossing to an adjacent region. The current goal is to keep the nearest four regions live at reasonably high detail. So draw distance is 120 meters. I still can't figure out why this delay happens. It's really frustrating. Logs tell me that an EstablishAgentCommunication message comes in one minute late. Henri Beauchamp only sees a 10 second delay. With Open Simulator, there's no delay. Very puzzled. (There's much test code running here. This isn't anywhere near final. There's no camera motion filtering yet, so it's a rough, but realistic, ride. Motion interpolation is still very dumb. That's so the cosmetic algorithms don't hide underlying bugs. Content loading priority policy doesn't pay attention to which way you're looking or how fast you're going yet.) The large amounts of empty land are not a bug. That's the Kama City land market.

I can't find a signal bridge there, but the Virtual Railway Consortium has a freebie collection at Tuliptree/121/172. That has many signal parts. There's also an SLRR parts box of mole-created parts in the Mole Mart at Leafminer/195/151. Most of this stuff is from 2010 or so and has rather high land impact. Don't know where to get the Bellessaria signal bridge.

I keep my avi at 5 minutes to "Away" and slumped. If my avatar goes to "Away", I feel I should either be sitting, or logging out. Or at least on my own property, not in public. I feel it's rude to be "Away" in a public place.

SL does tend to look dead, even when avatars are around. I'd like to have a bit for IMing, like the one for typing, available to avatar scripts. Then, when you're IMing, the AO could pull out a cell phone. There are animations for that, but they're triggered by local typing, too, which looks wrong. Reliable indication of avatar status would be nice. If the avatar gets no user inputs for a while, show the "AWAY" indicator. Perhaps Region Tracker and the map should be aware of AWAY state. Places which don't want avatars just standing around AFK could put in an experience which seats them on some out of the way seating. I have a demo of that at the little park bench behind my workshop in Vallone. Stand close to it for 30 seconds without doing anything and you will be seated on the bench. There's a sign nearby to explain this.

But new users are warned not to accept teleports from strangers.

Check your outfits Wearing list for unexpected items. It may be attached to your avatar. Can you find it with Area Search in Firestorm? When you find it, get a screen shot of it in the Edit menu to show the creator and previous owner, and report it to LL as a griefing object.

A normal map is a set of vectors, stored as XYZ values in RGB color format. All the vectors are supposed to have unit length. If you have light and dark areas in the normal map, your normal map is broken. All the cells should have roughly the same intensity.

I'm reading this, and thinking, am I going to have to support this thing in Sharpview? Useful third party technical info source with open source code. Another technical info source with open source code. Linux/Win/Mac support! It's a "Human Interface Device", which is the standard way computers talk to keyboards, mice, joysticks, game controllers, etc. HID is mostly for input, but it can do output. A typical output application is a game steering wheel with force feedback. and vibration. It might be possible to interface these things via the upcoming SL game controller interface. The data connection to the device is over Bluetooth Low Energy radio. This is very short range. Lovense really wants you to connect to it by going through your phone and their servers. If it's set up that way, they know your IP address and what you're doing with the thing. That's how those SL HUDs which talk to Lovense devices work. Viewer support isn't required. The data path is SL viewer to outgoing HTTP to Lovense server to phone client to device. It's possible to connect to the things without going through their servers. There's enough open source code to allow avoiding Lovense servers. In fact, the amount of effort that's gone into open source code for these things is substantial. There's even Rust support. There are multiple vendors selling related products. They're all incompatible, but not hugely different. Anybody implementing a direct interface should probably have product liability insurance. Especially if support is provided for devices with electric shock features. (Yes, they exist.) I'm not going to support this in Sharpview in the near term, unless LL supports it as part of the game controller interface.

Is this multi-level marketing for SL land? Or what?

Wait, there's reselling in Belliseria now?

Avatars seated on a vehicle are child prims. Under normal conditions, they are all under the control of the same sim as the vehicle. When the root prim of the vehicle is 1m past the region edge, the crossing triggers. The avatars in the back of the bus have their control shifted to the new region, even if they're still located in the old region. It's a weird situation. Avatars tend to fall off multi-passenger vehicles at single region crossings. That indicates yet another bug. One bug at a time. We all have to keep pushing.

I'm encouraged that this is getting attention. There are a number of ordinary bugs, such as the ones Monty Linden has located in the event poller system. If the event poller loses events, things will break and stall. So that's a clear bug, and once fixed, some other random misbehavior may disappear. This is not about packet loss, or, at least, in the absence of packet loss, things still break. Sharpview logs all reliable UDP message losses, and keeps retransmitting, with backoff, until packets get through. These region crossing problems appear even with zero lost UDP messages. This does not seem to be a network problem on the UDP side. There are some touchy timing constraints. I've previously noted that a 2 second delay on sending RegionHandshakeReply after a login seems to fix some interest list problems. There's a temporary viewer/simulator ambiguity over where the avatar is after a teleport or login, as the simulator resolves "last", "home", landing points, and obstacles into a sane avatar location. Waiting 2 seconds helps. There may be other problems like that. The EstablishAgentCommunication delay, perhaps. Although that's very consistent when I try it at Morris/Dore on the beta grid. The deepest problem seems to be double region crossings. Everything else is, I suspect, an ordinary bug. But double region crossings may be a design problem. The usual stuck state is where a vehicle is in the third region but avatar(s) are stuck in the second. The second region doesn't push the avatar to the third region for some reason, and the third region doesn't seem to have a way to pull the avatar from the second region. Possible rule: object with sitters cannot cross a region boundary until all seated avatars both have object presence (ObjectUpdate, you can see the avatar) and control presence (CrossedRegion, keyboard and mouse events are going to the right place) in the same region as the vehicle. This would only affect crossings at region corners and really fast vehicles. (The F-16 on afterburner can cause a double region crossing situation by sheer speed.) This means a second crossing of a vehicle can't start until the first one has reached a complete, stable state. It's not a hard stop at every region crossing; the sailors hate that. It's a hard stop at the second region crossing, which was about to fail anyway.

That's what seems to happen. If the camera isn't close enough to the edge, the region won't come up at all. Once it's close enough, sometimes there is a one minute delay. That happens even with the avatar stationary.

Yes. It's a hard problem. The worst case I've seen in practice was when a busload of furries tried to do a Drivers of SL drive. At each region crossing, they'd lose one or two passengers. The passengers would then try to teleport and fly to the bus and get back on. That was with ordinary single region crossings. One of the best arguments for fixing this is that it makes group social activities work better. Boating, group trips, etc. The pew-pew crowd gets very unhappy when they fall out of a tank or aircraft. It's interesting that single crossings with multiple avatars on a vehicle fail badly. It's not clear why they should. Single crossings with single avatars on a vehicle are reasonably reliable. We know there's a transient overload on a sim when avatars enter and leave; every major sales event suffers from that. Is some response to that overload leaving something un-done? That might be worth investigating. I've thought about viewer-side workarounds, such as detecting stuck avatars in the viewer, then asking for a teleport to the vehicle location followed by a sit. I don't really want to implement that, but it's an option.

A missing RegionHandshake message means a region won't appear in the viewer. So one can see how a fix like that might go in. Worse, from a sim-side perspective, if a viewer fails to send RegionHandshakeReply to the viewer (an early version of Sharpview did that), it leaves the avatar sim-side in a bad state. On the Other Simulator, that lasts until sim restart, and it takes two logins to clear. SL seems to time out after a while. Sims really need that RegionHandshakeReply. If there's some way a RegionHandshakeReply could be lost or not be processed sim-side, that might justify sending extra RegionHandshake messages to get things unstuck. There's still that 10 seconds / 1 minute stall around EstablishAgentCommunication. That's the next handshake that has to complete to get a region talking to the viewer. Amusingly, entering the region with the avatar in Sharpview will consistently generate an EstablishAgentCommunication message from the simulator quickly. I do this all the time at the Morris corner on the beta grid to get all four regions to go live quickly. Looks awful, but consistently works for testing. So, whatever isn't sending EstablishAgentCommunication is ready to send it.

Yes. Some changes will require re-generation. That's true of BOM now.

You can still have rigged mesh doing its thing. The GPU does the work on rigged mesh.

From my perspective with Sharpview, SL non-avatar content complexity is a manageable problem. Land impact keeps things from getting so bad the GPU can't handle them. Avatars, though... To solve this, we need some kind of mesh baking that happens on a clothing change. Like bakes on mesh, but operating on the meshes themselves, not just textures. Simplify stacked layers. Combine meshes. Discard triangles that can't possibly appear. Mesh reduce. Bake down to a one-piece animesh. There are tools for this, but not for SL. Anyone tried Mesh Baker?