animats

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.

Do it neatly. If you don't do that, you get ugly jaggyness like this. It takes some cooperation to make angled land edges look right. LL does not seem to object to landscape objects which match their theme. Trees which hang over roads are very common, as is landscaping up to the road edge.

As a quest, it's pretty disappointing. You get to visit the gift shop, which has rather uninteresting merch.There's a mansion, but nothing happens there. There's a miniature golf course. Not a good one. There's a fast food place, where nothing happens. There's a maze - just follow the left wall. And then you're at the closed portal to Phase II and done. Zenescope just isn't trying. They have good content. But not in SL. Now this is what Zenescope should have put into SL. That outfit should be available at their gift shop. And at a store in New Babbage. They could encourage Zenescope roleplay. Make machinima. Put videos on YouTube. But no. They did the minimum, and nobody cares.

Is that video pirated from some other video? The content is in a little box surrounded by video noise. Link to the original?

You can do this, but media on a prim is deliberately limited, because the overhead is huge. Each prim face with media launches a full copy of a web browser inside each viewer that can see it. (It's Google Chromium, the open-source form of Chrome without DRM, and it shows up as "Dullihan" in your active processes.) The worst case can be seen in Cretopia, where there is a ring of prims in the air with media on a prim on each one. If you enable all of them, you need a computer with a lot of CPUs and maybe 32GB of memory. Works fine for watching TV and movies in SL (although not for paid services such as Netflix, because those use DRM and each viewer copy has to pay). For ordinary images, it works, but should be used sparingly.

Zenescope seems to have abandoned their SL project. I did phase I of their quest months ago. At the end, there's a portal, and a "Phase II coming soon" sign. But Phase II never came.

If you're stuck at "Requesting region capabilities", try logging into a different region. You got through initial login, which is your viewer talking to the login server. The login server then looks at where you want to start, and aims you at the server for that sim. If that sim isn't answering, you're stuck. But it usually means a problem with that specific region. Try, in the region box at login: Social Island 10 (SL's answer to the Port Authority Bus Terminal) Burns (You land on a rarely used dirt road.) Natoma (You land in front of The Ivory Tower of Prims) Those all have good default landing points, so just typing in the region name is good enough. Once you're in, go someplace else you want to go. If a teleport fails, the destination region is probably having problems. If you can't get into any of those, something more serious is wrong.

I am slightly more hopeful than Lucia, but based on 2021 LL performance, she's more likely to be right than wrong.

This strengthens the argument for a little more structure on mainland. Bellesaria security orb and skybox rules on Mainland. Sim surrounds should be discouraged, and not permitted in urban areas or adjacent to roads, railroads, or waterways. Offer a land swap to parcels on isolated islands for people who want isolation. (Useful hint: If you need a wall that badly, consider trees. Anne Erotica has a set of low-prim trees which combine to form a solid surface. Looks equally good from inside and outside.) Not too much structure. Just enough to keep the junkyness level down.

That old Mole joke may have become stale. At one time, nobody really wanted to go to the south end of Satori, but there's more beyond the bridge now. There's a rail terminus under construction at the south end of Satori, with a rez zone so you can rez a boat and go to Bellessaria. Things are getting connected. Incidentally, don't teleport to Fenric region by name. The default landing point for the region has an aggressive security orb. Not only is it only 10 seconds, you can't fly and you're in a walled courtyard. Then "You have been banned indefinitely".

I went to look, and I see the price has been reduced to $750 per week. There's too much vacant land for rent in Kama City. Prices need to come down even more.

We do have more of a sense of where LL is trying to go since Mojo Linden came on board. It's to move SL in the direction of being more alive. Better performance. There's some slight progress on speeding up the viewers. Facial expression tracking. That's on the 2022 roadmap. Now, with Rosedale on board, better voice chat, using the High Fidelity spatial audio technology. SL looks dead compared to most virtual worlds. Fixing that now seems to be a priority.

The second one isn't hard. You can do it now, with some effort.There are some objects that won't let you click on them unless you have line of sight. At least one brand of door does that. You could put that in open source AVsitter as an option. Then, if you made sure everything in your house had unscripted sits disabled, nobody could do a "sit" to get in. Set a teleport destination for the parcel outside the house, and they can't TP in by specifying coordinates.