animats
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Posts posted by animats
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34 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:
But we now have Philip onboard as a consultant and he had quite a bit of interest in blockchain when he was working on High Fidelity. I wouldn't assume he has changed his mind on that since unless he specifically says as much.
In the recent Lab Gab with Rosedale and Oberwager, the policy was pretty clear. Ads, no way - SL has more revenue per user than YouTube or Facebook. NFTs, probably not, no current plans, but not totally closing the door. Some way to import externally created NFTs into SL and use them in-world, maybe. Oberwager said that if anyone is already doing NFTs in world (which is quite possible via scripting), please tell Strawberry Linden about it.
Here's the best argument against NFTs:
Axie Infinity's Smooth Love Potion token. How low can it go?
Last summer, Axie Infinity was the hottest thing in play-to-earn. Axie is a game. It's like Pokémon. You buy Axies, which are NFTs, for about US$1200 to get into the game. They are "trained" and "fought" like the card game. If you win, you earn Smooth Love Potion tokens. Some people rent Axies, so they have to work harder but don't put in money up front.
This became a big thing in the Philippines. People were quitting their day job to play Axie. There were people claiming it could lift entire populations out of poverty.
All the money comes from new players buying in. When the supply of new players dried up, the scheme collapsed. It was a Ponzi scheme.
That's the reality of play-to-earn.
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"1999, more than a generation into the future!" Ford Seattle-ite concept car, 1964.
(This is not driveable. It's a half-size mockup. But in SL, it could be.)
The famous Firebird 3, from General Motors in 1958. Now owned by Jay Leno, and in driveable condition.
Project for a car-builder in SL - replicate some of the great concept cars of the 1950s and 1960s.
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4 hours ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:
Or, you could, you know, just buy the land you asked for as soon as it's been set in your name. If you don't want it, ask Support to cancel the sale.
Yes. I did a buy like that recently, when a big build near me was abandoned. As soon as I got the message that it was for sale to me, I logged in and bought it. Then I did some quick basic building to make it into a little park. I'll build something more elaborate when I have time to spend in Blender, but meanwhile I want it to improve the neighborhood.
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On 1/30/2022 at 9:38 AM, Lindal Kidd said:
I figure nobody can steal the silver or even muss the sheets.
I have a bowl of apples in the kitchen of my Belli house. Anyone can take an apple, but only the owner can refill the bowl. One day, the number of apples left dropped from 8 to 7. So I'd had a visitor. Not a problem.
On 1/30/2022 at 9:38 AM, Lindal Kidd said:The one thing I WASN'T expecting is that double-click teleporting doesn't work. It drops me into the ocean at a set region teleport spot.
I have my parcel's landing point set outside the front door, which seems reasonable. I don't use double-click teleporting myself; it seems like cheating.
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5 hours ago, ChinRey said:
As for the not-so-basic tutorial and social areas, for something like this you can just bypass them and make your own streamlined substitute.
When it comes to the starter avatar issue, make your own selection of good looking ones.
Right. If you're using SL for an event or a B2B target market, you have to help people through the onboarding process.
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As someone who follows the crypto worlds, a bit of info.
Second Life has about 35,000 to 50,000 logged in users at any time. Decentraland has about 1000. Sominium Space has under 100. Roblox has millions, but the average user age is 13. Fortnite has millions and likes making deals to get major-brand content into their game. You have to be at the Marvel/Disney level for such deals.
Now, if you have clients that have fear of missing out on the Metaverse and are drawn to the crypto worlds, make them aware that few people go there. They just trade assets. Asset issuers ("minters") make money as a class, while asset buyers ("suckers?") lose as a class, because it's a zero-sum game. The NFT fad seems to be winding down. The biggest NFT player was Axie Infinity. See the chart for their Smooth Love Potion token, the one that large numbers in the Philippines played to earn. After looking at that chart for the last year, you will see the problem.
There are a number of metaverse systems from the NFT crowd that are supposed to be really great Real Soon Now. Most of them underestimate how hard it is to make this work, and some are outright scams. If you can't log in right now, pass.
The real problem here, I suspect, is that you have clients who've heard the metaverse hype. They've seen NFTs being advertised on billboards in New York City. They think it's time for brands to jump in. It's not. The brand-oriented metaverse has not yet happened. It may not happen at all.
Second Life is not oriented towards branding. Second Life is not ad-based. There is very little in-world advertising for businesses that are not operating in world. There's nothing prohibiting that. It's just that nobody is very interested. Second Life has cars, for example, but the car brands (Entourage, Paladin, Sultan etc.) are businesses within Second Life, not licensed properties of major real world brands. The same is true for clothing. Second Life makers have their own brands, with their own reputations.
The onboarding experience for Second Life is rather harsh. First, you have to download a viewer. Then there's a basic tutorial. At the end of that, you have an avatar that's not all that great, you exit the tutorial at a social area full of people who prey on new users, and have no clue what to do next.
If you want to hold an event in Second Life, and are willing to staff the event, that's practical. You can have some people of your own in world to shepherd the attendees through the onboarding, plus a phone number and web site for help. That's a good way to get warmed up on doing this. Get your guides and support people up to speed and in place and invite some people to come to an event or exhibit. Take video from a new user's viewpoint. You'll learn the problems involved, and it's not expensive to experiment.
You can also do that in Open Simulator, and have total control over the experience. Setup is harder and performance may be lower, but no one will be in that you don't let in.
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Fountain
Recently, the landowner who owned most of the Zindra region where my workshop is left SL. This left most of the region vacant. So I bought the parcel adjacent to mine, and built a water feature.
This is a very simple build. It starts with a cube, expanded to 20m in X and Y, and with the maximum sized square hole. A purchased animated water texture piece provides the water. There's a hollow cylinder for the fountain, with a particle emitter, and a light to illuminate the water. Looped audio of a fountain finished the job. 4 LI.
For now, it's a small urban park. I may build something later. I want to see what appears in the vacant lots first.
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You can make a prim to fit that shape and then adjust its start or end to change the level. Make a cylinder with some taper and play with the start and end params.
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Reviews of Facebook Horizon are very negative. They're just not good at virtual worlds.
I suspect Facebook's real product will be some kind of augmented reality goggles. The people who walk around looking at their phone all the time will go for this. It will look something like the Hyperreality video I've linked before - like Pokemon Go with ads on top of everything and lots of notifications.
My real worry is that the NFT clown car is going to crash so hard that a year from now, the Metaverse is as dead as 3D TV. Before the serious players, Epic, Roblox, and LL get the technology right.
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This forum runs 0 to 2 annoying new users at a time. Not a major problem.
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There's a place in Calintreau called "Dirt Cheap Gatcha". It's leftover no-copy items nobody wants. Dozens of ugly chairs. Dancing gingerbread people. Stuffed animals. Bad wall posters. Sad-looking potted plants. Furniture for cheap hotel rooms. Coffee tables shaped like guitars. If that's what you want...
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3 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:
To be fair, when I look at reviews of SL, I mostly see "I don't know what to do.", "I don't know where to go.", "Stuff costs too much money in this game.", "It's too hard making an avatar/outfit.", "The viewer layout is hard to figure out." even "Someone crashed my viewer!" or "I can't go anywhere without finding griefers/trolls." than I do "There's too much fringe/kinky sex/pervs in this game!". 😆
Yes. From hanging around new user areas, the two main problems are "what do I do now", and "how do I fix this %$#@ clothing problem?" The single most useful piece of info I've given to new users is how to use the "Save As" button in the T-shirt menu to save an outfit, so they can then go back to a safe outfit after a clothing malfunction. For new users, the starter outfit ought to be auto-saved at start, so they can always go back without having to discover how to do a full avatar switch.
Biggest single challenge for LL: make a new user's first hour fun.
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12 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:
would be curious to see if the system can pass 89k logins.
Easily, if they're spread across the grid. Too many avatars within a region will choke the sim process. Too many within view distance will choke the viewer. But spread out over many regions, no problem. Look how empty the map looks with 50,000 people logged in.
16 hours ago, JustJephrey said:I've very curious to see how SL handles the new whales in the virtual world pond.
Me too. The NFT clown car is slowing down. The Make Money Fast crowd turns out to be terrible at building usable worlds. Epic, Roblox, Facebook, and Microsoft, though, are staffing up and implementing stuff, with budgets in the billions. Those companies have a good record of shipping products. Interesting things are coming.
16 hours ago, JustJephrey said:But as tech savvy and creative as so many are, we're not pro developers. We dont take the time or care enough about getting the most out of every spec of available digispace. A home built by a pro is beautifuly designed, built and then optimized to where it weighs nothing comparing that to a typical sl builder, designer, creator, a left shoe, thatll look amazing, will end up taking up as much space as a city built by a prodev.
This is a common plaint. I've written about the technical end of this before. I'd like to see technical fixes. Chic Aeon wants designers to do better, and routinely makes impressive low-LI objects. But she's moved over to Open Simulator.
One possible idea is to smarten up Marketplace, so that mesh analyzers look at what you're selling and score the efficiency of the objects on sale. Then use that to help determine ad placement.
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On 1/25/2022 at 5:07 PM, Prokofy Neva said:
Operation Mainland has a kiosk you put on your land
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.
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Bay City seems to be completely up. So, everybody go to your favorite spots in Bay City until LL gets things fixed.
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2 hours ago, Shungiku said:
• Restarted puter
• Restarted Router - and checked connection speed (good)
• Removed both SL and Phx/FireStorm viewers, and did a "fresh" install of both
• Made sure my Security software (firewall) allowed Second Life and FireStorm as Exceptions.
• Tried Launching both as Admin.
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.
1 hour ago, Tick Marville said:I guess we just wait to get back home.
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.
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Working late at the office.
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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.
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18 minutes ago, Gilgamesh Alpha said:
There are organizations that are lobbying for age verification to access porn sites. Several governments even have plans to implement it.
The UK was close to mandating it but gave up. Wikipedia has detailed info by country if you care.
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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.
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12 hours ago, Rabid Cheetah said:
Are you sure you're at the right spot? That doesn't sound like Operation Mainland. They've got a lot of great roadside and waterside parcels at reasonable prices.
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.
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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.
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"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.
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Why SL is been left out of the current metaverse hype?
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
Playing "Convenience Store Employee, The Game"? At least give them something fun.