animats

I just got one of their passports, and a kiosk to put up. When you get a passport, you get to select which continent you are from. They have the usual SL continents, plus "Counterearth". Is that an existing place? One of the old Gorean sims? I'd like to put in a plug for New Babbage and the Fruit Islands. Anything with more than a dozen regions and a resident population should be represented.

Bay City seems to be completely up. So, everybody go to your favorite spots in Bay City until LL gets things fixed.

None of those are likely to affect the situation. If you get stuck at "Requesting Region Capabilities", and you've previously been able to log into SL, it's probably trouble on the SL side. What that message means is that your viewer connected to the SL login server, the login server approved your login, and told your viewer what region you're starting at. The viewer then tries to talk to the region's sim server. But that sim didn't answer. So, check grid status and the forums if you see that message. It's bad. Here's the section of the world map that shows Belli. Purple regions are offline. Purple regions are offline as of 1115SLT 2022-01-25.

Working late at the office.

Game Developer's Conference attendee survey, 2022. (From Kotaku) There's a huge split between people pushing NFTs and people with 3D worlds that are any good.

The UK was close to mandating it but gave up. Wikipedia has detailed info by country if you care.

It's hard to see the need for age verification for SL users when PornHub doesn't have it and nobody seems to be bothered much by that any more.

I started here. Operation Mainland office, Bay City The Cliffs at Lota, from the SLURL from the display at the office. Last time, I somehow ended up in a skybox in that skybox stack, apparently its rental office.This time, on a parcel at ground level. They've done a nice job of repurposing some cliff-top space that's hard to use.

Their in-world hub is strange. It's a skybox with some signs. There's a door. If you walk through the door, you're falling in space. Then you splat onto a skybox. Below that, there's another skybox. And another. And another. The ground level has an abandoned drive-in theater which doesn't seem to play movies. I may be wrong, but it kind of looks like Operation Mainland is a realty operation that rents the ground level of skybox stacks.

"Hey, look, a default. Loser!" - Fortnite insult, middle school level. My usual comment on starter avatars is that sticking anybody with 70s Disco Guy with Radio is cruelty to new users. At least start them with Boy Next Door. Randomize the shirt color and pattern a bit. New users who don't make an explicit choice should get a neutral avatar. One that doesn't have an implicit role or personality. Starting people with jeans and a T-shirt is not a bad choice. The common female starter avatar, Woman with Big Floppy Hat and Purse with Small Yappy Dog, isn't bad. But it does imply a role - luxury tourist.

http://operationmainland.org not found.

Line goes down. How low can it go? The NFT market is Axie Infinity (above), OpenSea (a market), Bored Ape Yacht Club (a set of collectables), and the little guys. Axie Infinity has a pay-to-earn game. It's like Pokémon. To play, you have to buy Axies, for about US$1000. Then you train and fight them. You earn Smooth Love Potion tokens this way. This really caught on in the Philippines. Poor people were quitting their day job to play. And, for a few months last summer, this was a good living. But the money all came from new players (suckers) joining. It's a Ponzi scheme - the gains of the early adopters come from the payments of the late adopters. This never ends well. Line went down. OpenSea is a market in non-fungible token art. Each item is priced separately. So, this works like Beanie Babies on eBay. The market stalls rather than crashing. You can't sell because you can't find a buyer. On eBay, you'll find many Beanie Babies offered for sale at US$5000 or so. Offered. That's an asking price. Most items have zero bids. Now look at completed sales, which eBay will show, although it's not that easy to find out how. Actual sales happen around $50. That's a stalled market. That's where OpenSea is now. Many zero-bid items, or bids below a "floor" price, so no transaction occurs. Because cryptocurrencies are semi-anonymous, it's possible to pump up the prices of items by "wash sales", where someone sells something to themself at an exaggerated price. This is a criminal offense for stocks, legal for artworks, and very common in the NFT world. The NFT thing is over. Some of the marks just don't know it yet.

Maybe not. The real value in SL is the content and the users. If the tooling is developed with Unreal Engine 6 or 7 or 8 to make an SL clone easy, it could happen. Possibly from the Open Simulator crowd, if LL doesn't do it. Figure out a way to port content, and provide teleporting between the old and new systems. Gradually convert. First the beta grid so people can debug, then the single region private islands, then the larger private islands, and then, finally, mainland continents. Kind of like the AWS transition.

You probably meant "amateur". In animation, creating an armature means creating a skeleton and the "motors" that drive the joints. But anyway. This is no longer a stupid question. Because 1) Epic has been making huge progress with Unreal Engine 5, and 2) Epic says they want to extend this into a metaverse. Right now, you can not only watch that demo as a video. You can download the new Matrix demo and run it on a PS5 or Xbox X/S. You can then explore 16 square kilometers of city, at a resolution so high you can zoom in on paper cups on the street. That's their new Nanite system in action. Later this year the demo will be available for PCs. UE says they will release the demo content, and you'll be able to compile, run, and mod it. I'm looking forward to that. Not all the pieces for a metaverse are there yet. UE5 can stream content from a local solid state disk, but that's a very high bandwidth, low latency situation. That's how those incredible demos work. As yet, there's no good solution for doing this in real time from remote servers. That's an interesting theoretical problem, one that Epic probably has a large number of people working upon. I think it's going to take help from edge servers of the CDN to send just the right pieces to the client. A UE5 Nanite mesh is a big file from which different parts can be viewed at different resolutions. It's a much finer grained level of detail system than has been seen before. That's how they do those insanely detailed demos. For the demos, the huge meshes have to be loaded locally, which is slow. They need to be loaded with only some areas at high resolution, based on the viewpoint. Somebody server-side needs to create the proper customized mixed-resolution copy of the mesh and ship it to the client. That work needs to be offloaded to edge servers of the content delivery network. All this stuff creates the bookkeeping problem from hell. But Epic cracked that for the rendering engine already. Next, the network. Then there's the problem of user-generated content. Unreal Engine relies on heavy preprocessing and optimization which takes place as content is built with the developer tools. In a changeable world, the developer tools for a single object don't see enough of the world all at once to do that. That's a problem for Second Life, which just skips that step. Un-optimized content gets into the asset servers, which is part of why SL chokes on complex content. That optimization job needs to be done somewhere in the pipeline. Probably on servers which are optimizing content in the background. SL has a bit of this, with Bakes on Mesh and the builder of the pathfinding grid. But not enough. Then there's the big-world server problem. Improbable's Spatial OS was supposed to solve this, but it's too expensive to run and game devs who have tried it found it painful. But it's approximately the right idea. Spatial OS has regions, and can move the region boundaries while the system is running. So when more avatars are in an area, they divide it into smaller regions, to put more CPU power on the job. Empty areas are combined into big regions. So you can have a thousand avatars close by without choking the servers. At last, crowds are possible. There have been other attempts to make this concept work. Progress continues. So, enough of the pieces are now working that you can see them starting to come together. Not enough is here yet for SL to move over, though. Epic has a development budget of over a billion dollars to build a metaverse. Sony put up some of the money. Roblox is also putting a few billion into the general metaverse problem. Developing this kind of technology is above LL's pay grade. But it's getting done by others. Sometime around Unreal Engine 7, you'll probably be able to create a basic metaverse just by downloading UE and compiling some demo. So that's the technology of the not too distant future. What will be done with it, who can say? But the Ready Player One quality level looks to be reasonably close. If you doubt this, go watch the Matrix demo.

Then someone else pointed out that VRchat is way ahead in clubbing.

Someone posted this on Reddit today, in r/metaverse.

On Reddit's r/metaverse, Second Life has been mentioned a lot. Mostly because when someone talks about the metaverse doing something someday, someone posts an example of SL doing it right now. Owning land, building, rares, etc.

There used to be more of that, but I haven't seen it recently. One day, a dozen avatars were suddenly nearby all the time, but not at ground level. I went way up to a skybox to see what was going on. Turned out to be a gay AFK place supervised by a bot. After about a month of nothing but the AFKs and the bot showing up, the owner shut down, and the land was purchased by the usual land baron. The current thing is building clubs. There are four clubs within 200m, two of which get traffic. I have a non-adult business in an adult area. A motorcycle business should be in a sketchy neighborhood, as they often are in real life. I get a reasonable amount of traffic that way. Hm? Most, if not all, of the parcels in the Kama City area are exact multiples of 512m^2. They have little 4m x 8m bites of Linden land cut out of the corners to make them come out even. Sometimes the moles put a 4m x 8m planter there, but mostly they don't and the landowner has to figure out some way to deal with the hole. Anyway, the Vallone auctions are complete now. Buyers are one land flipper, and a non land baron.

That was the standard Rosedale interview. Nothing new there. Mostly looking back, not forward. Here's another recent Rosedale interview. (Skip the first 3:30; it's all ads). Bill Gurley is on this one, too. This predates Rosedale coming back to LL. This is a much more valuable talk. The two of them go into what works and what doesn't. Notes: There's a conflict between graphics quality and the ability to build by ordinary users. Avatar based worlds only appeal to a certain fraction of the adult population, those who are willing to give up their real-world identity to take on another one. The metaverse might be Discord with spatial audio. People need a public place they can get together to decide what to do next, together. In a game, the character is a prop, and it doesn't affect the gameplay, but in an virtual world we have to get past the uncanny valley. "If graphics quality mattered Second Life would have crushed everybody". Games have "quicker dopamine stuff" than a virtual world. Cryptocurrency is the price of distrust, and that price is not low. Too high for a virtual world. Voice does not work socially with latency above 0.2 second.

China did that last fall. They actually cut the power to crypto mining operations. Then the arrests started.

That's excessive. My NPCs have 14, and they're doing a lot. My bikes have 4.

There was supposedly a simulator improvement in the last rollout that should improve script performance. So anything in the last week that caused script performance to decline should be reported as a bug.

Is there a transcript or summary?

Well, if someone is showing merch at an event, at least you know they're still in SL. The curse of Marketplace is items where you go to "See Item in Second Life" and it's no longer there. I hate ending up falling in space, or in someone's house, following those links. Marketplace needs a background job which checks those links. Scan the destination sim for the UUIDs of objects being sold. If nothing matches, the link should be marked as a dead link and the store owner informed.

A landowner who had a city-type area recently moved out, and LL is selling off the now-cleared land. About 20,000 m^2. See the LL auctions page. This is in Vallone, in downtown Kama City. So, if you want adult land, here's a chance to buy some. I have parcels in Vallone myself, but don't need even more land. I'd like to see someone build something interesting nearby. Theres a cyberpunk build nearby, and continuing that theme would be interesting. The next sim over, Charlesville, is a forest of FOR SALE and FOR RENT signs. One of the land barons is hovering above the property now.