animats

In the beginning, everything was alpha blending. Then came Materials. Materials include the ability to set alpha mode. So, there are "classic materials", with color and texture only, and new materials (normals, specular, projectors, alpha mode, etc.). As soon as you use any feature of new materials, the "new land impact" calculation is used. Make a prim toroid (donut shape), it's 1 LI. Give it any material property, and it will go way up in LI as it switches to the new land impact calculation. That kept the introduction of materials from increasing the land impact of old objects. Only new objects that use at least one Materials feature. Internally, the moment you do anything that involves materials, a block of data about materials becomes associated with the object. That data has to be downloaded from the sim via a separate HTTP request. So materials do make both sim server server and client do some extra work.

Audio uploads are short so as not to arouse the wrath of the music industry. At 10 seconds, LL doesn't have to check audio against copyright validation systems.

Visit New Babbage. It has many clock towers, and some of them have a clock mechanism inside.

Premium membership gets you an unfurnished house. Look here. https://go.secondlife.com/land/linden-homes

Oh! Now I get it. This is the Knockout game. "Only one person can win and everyone fights to keep the current High Score in this fast paced action packed timed traffic gaming system that plays just like Slot Bingo or "Zyngo" and the winner gets a L$ Jackpot and is FREE to play!" So driving other users away is profitable. That's an perverse incentive system rarely seen in Second Life. There are are other games intended to draw traffic to a region, such as fishing games and lucky chairs, but they don't have a game mechanic which encourages obnoxious behavior. "The only way to win is not to play".

Do you mean "It happened a long time ago in the past", or "It happened many times recently?"

Pendulum in Builder's Brewery sandbox The bearing is a knife-edge against a shallow V of knife edges. All knife edges have zero friction. You can build one, and it will swing for a while, but not for very long. It doesn't slow down, it just stops at some random angle. That's something the physics engine does after a while so you can't have endlessly spinning wheels using up simulator time. Common in game engines. It's quite possible to do a Focault pendulum in a physics system, but SL's is throttled down for overhead reasons.

Yes. I think Mojo Linden gets it. The big problem is "slow". He's made performance improvement a priority for his dev team. Every competitive product is faster. That plays into the perception of Second Life as a has-been platform.

SL doesn't have a cloth physics system to make layers behave. So if you want cuffs down at shoe level, the shoes and pants have to be designed carefully to fit together. Look on marketplace for Men's Suits. Those often come with matching shoes, for people who want business attire.

Try Graves in Oxymoron. They have a large shop of that sort of thing. But check carefully what outfits fit which avatars, and try demos.

There was a Polish Embassy in New Babbage, and it was taken down recently. I don't know if it was official.

I know that one. Something I'm still looking for is a matching set of animations for my NPCs, which animate like bento avatars. I need: A few stands, including stand with arms crossed. Walk slowly Walk fast Run Left turn, usable with walks Right turn, usable with walks. All these should transition smoothly as the NPC changes modes. The transitions are the important thing. I wish I could adjust speed, ease-in and ease-out on purchased anims.

Visit Mount Campion National Forest. Explore the caves. Bring a lamp.

I noticed that LL is finally acknowledging that there's a lot of "metaverse" stuff going on, and others are headed for their niche. Wall Street Journal comment this week in "The Metaverse is already here". "This has been tried before. A virtual space called “Second Life” launched in 2003. You could buy digital property and clothes with real money and hang out with other blocky avatars. It was early days. Naysayers in Silicon Valley liked to say that “Second Life” was for those who didn’t have a first one." Second Life still has a serious PR problem.

Tilia, which claims to be in the money transfer business, needs to get out of the Paypal kiddie pool and hook up to ACH and SEPA, like a real financial services business. Then they can just send money to your bank account.

The Destination Guide has some good places to start. Strawberry Linden is always putting art exhibits on her blog.

Swimming should be part of standard avatar behavior. If you want to stay underwater, you should need a diving attachment like a weight belt to pull you down.

How about a "business account"? Can be opened in the name of a corporation. Subaccounts with limited privileges for employees. Ability to create accounting subaccounts, which are tied to the main account and are for owning land and accounting purposes but can't log into world. Full two-factor authentication with a Yubikey or similar, to protect large assets. Excel spreadsheet export for transaction and land data.

Check for head and body having the same alpha mode. If one has "alpha blending" and one has "alpha masking", you'll get this.

"This video is unavailable"?

I'm not sure what Premium Plus should have, either. SL already has private communities of elaborate houses, such as The Grove and the Fruit Islands. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, currently in the Destination Guide, is perhaps the most impressive home in Second Life. It's not just a big build, it's one done with artistry. So you can get a luxury lifestyle now, if you want.

Nice. Gyazo has become painful when you're not logged in. So go to the image, open it in a new tab, and post the URL of the actual image . Like this.

Linden Lab has a roadmap! Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness Premium Plus - a new upgrade option with added features and extras A new mobile viewer to enhance and improve your Second Life experience Improved group chat reliability Viewer and script performance improvements New user avatar customization and improvements Updated mesh optimizer Search engine improvements Improved materials and terrain Adding web marketplace variants …and much more! First time in years we've seen anything that looks like a plan. This is encouraging. Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness Now that's moderately difficult, but other systems already have it. It should be popular with machima makers. Videos made in SL won't look so dead. A new mobile viewer to enhance and improve your Second Life experience Limited, cloud-hosted, or needs 5G? Really, a must-have to gain market share. Updated mesh optimizer That's already in test. It's essentially the same as the one in Blender. Improved materials and terrain PBR? Subsurface scattering for skin? Nanite ground? Should be interesting.

The big suspension bridge is gone now. There are disconnected bits of road all over the area. A sign showing the glory days of ERIA was left standing.

It's a feature of Second Life that you can't spam anything to a large number of people unless they go to the trouble of joining your group. This makes Second Life more peaceful.