[I want to be amazed by the best ART expressed in SL]

The Destination Guide has some good places to start.

Strawberry Linden is always putting art exhibits on her blog.

[SL - Year in Review (and looking forward)]

On 12/25/2021 at 5:27 AM, Qie Niangao said:

universal Linden water swimmer,

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.

[Anyone have any idea what "Premium Plus" is?]

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.

[What is going on?]

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

[Video - Destination Macy's Parade]

"This video is unavailable"?

[SL - Year in Review (and looking forward)]

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.

[🎄 Seasonal Content and Decoration Guidelines 🎃]

3 hours ago, Evelyn Vanlager said:

https://gyazo.com/fefdf214a419780548d6989a2b337e24

my xmas house

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.

[SL - Year in Review (and looking forward)]

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.

 

 

[East River International Airport is going]

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.

[Is it possible to send something to many avatars at once when they are not members of a group?]

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.

[How to stop someone from moving?]

10 hours ago, Kinezis said:

make the combat hud rezz a posebal and use rlv to forcesit the player on_rezz.

 

10 hours ago, Kinezis said:

it does work in 3/10 times and I don't know why.

That suggests a race condition with rezzing. Rezzing is subject to random delays. If you rez something and then do something with it, you have to have the rezzed thing communicate with the rezzer to report that it's fully rezzed and scripts are running. Comes up all the time with weapons that rez projectiles.

[Continues grieving and the lax mentality around it.]

9 minutes ago, LilNosferatu said:

Geez, what in the world did this thread devolve into? 😂 

Sadly, I think we're approaching the "lock thread" point.

[East River International Airport is going]

It's a mess now. The RapidER transit system still has a few stations and tracks, but they're not connected. Roads end in midair at the edge of properties in Grizedale and Helvellyn. Somebody is starting to build where the East River International Airport used to be, but it's very basic building. East River Municipal Airport is intact, for now. The big suspension bridge and its roads, which are not Linden roads, are still up, with signs for places that no longer exist and bits of RapidER track.

So many people must have worked hard to make all those pieces connect.

[Continues grieving and the lax mentality around it.]

5 hours ago, Dorientje Woller said:

They are fully responsible for the safety or better phrased "the feeling of safety" of everybody who is using their platform.

As others have said, no. Second Life is not a "safe place". There are safe places within it, and many people have listed some of them.

We have a culture shock problem here. There are people growing up who think "safe places" are an entitlement. At some universities, they are. But not outside there.

Now, if you want "safe", there's Roblox. Roblox's average user is 13. They have thousands of moderators, outsourced to some low-wage country. Plus a vigilant AI system. Their goal is to block people saying "bad words" within 1/10 second, although they're not there yet.

Facebook Horizons has an elaborate "safety" system. Push one button and you're in your own invulnerable bubble. Plus they have a big "moderator" operation. Despite this, someone has been getting press coverage by complaining publicly about being "groped in the Metaverse". Apparently they hadn't figured out how to push the panic button. Or just wanted drama.

You can get much the same effect in Second Life by buying a "protection bubble" or "defender HUD" on Marketplace. Few people bother, but the products are available. Just sitting down on something prevents others from pushing you, by the way.

Linden Lab operates like City Hall of a medium sized city. They keep the infrastructure going, have a Linden Department of Public Works to build roads, parks, and such, collect property taxes ("tier"), and run a modest complaint department, the "governance" department.

You can complain about abuse from the Help->Abuse menu, and they may eventually do something about it. Mostly that's used for persistent problems, like someone blocking a road or leaving a griefing object running, or legally serious problems, like kiddie porn. They don't handle resident to resident disputes much.

What makes this work is that Second Life is big. It's about the size of Greater London. Jerks can only cause trouble for about a 100m radius, the distance you can shout. So they're a very local problem. Unlike, say, Twitter, Second Life does not provide a megaphone for reaching tens of thousands of people at once. The social dynamics are very different than those of forum and chat systems.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benj. Franklin.

[Continues grieving and the lax mentality around it.]

11 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Ok, so the problem is that you are currently relying on publicly accessible and rezzable land to make your things.

I'd suggest building at Builder's Brewery. Anyone can join for free and build there, and anyone who makes trouble there will be quickly banned by the group that runs the place. It's a peaceful place where people get better at building.

[NFT can kill SL?]

58 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Opensea, one of the main sites for NFT art has stopped accepting takedown requests, class action is on the cards. This is affecting a lot of artists.

 

There's a lot you can do. There are lawyers for this sort of thing.

Useful info: OpenSea is a d/b/a name of Ozone Networks, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Here is Delaware Corporation Search. If you send a properly written DMCA takedown demand (you're not just asking), to their agent for service of process, it will reach their lawyers. Here is the Nolo Press howto guide for sending DMCA notices.

OpenSea is probably not entitled to the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA for service providers because they, in the language of the DMCA, "receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity".

Look up "DMCA Lawyer". You can probably find someone to talk to for a few minutes for free. If the item is being resold for a large dollar amount, you might be able to get legal representation on a contingency basis, where you are not charged but the lawyer gets a cut.

[East River International Airport is going]

6 hours ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

Blackslough has been sold via auction. Pippen, along with parts of Helvellyn and Grizedale, are currently on the auction list (ending noon today). 

There are still quite a few of the old spots left, including the smaller ER Municipal Airport, which I suppose is one of the advantages of having various groups owning land. Maybe the remaining groups can keep their parcels going so that the community is not totally lost. 

Blackslough has been sold to an airport builder. Helvellyn has not been sold yet; those auctions close at noon SLT on Sunday, and the current bids are at L$0.50/m^2.

[Animesh trees vanishing and flickering]

What's your setting for "number of non-impostor avatars"?

Animesh count as avatars for rendering purposes, and can be impostored. The impostoring system is not very good at objects that don't have roughly avatar dimensions.

Making trees out of animesh, while possible, probably isn't that good an idea.

There are lots of good trees on Marketplace. OPQ and Anna Erotica have big selections at reasonable prices.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

2 hours ago, Giselle Kiyori said:

Read a curious article in the Guardian today about how the rollout of Zuck's metaverse has done nothing to deal with the general misogynistic ass-hattery that goes on in virtual spaces.

Facebook Horizon has far more "safety" than Second Life. That was a new user who hadn't found the panic button yet.  Here's the Facebook Horizon "safety" video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf_9J_EdzZw

They have more than enough "safety" features.

Now, Roblox really does try to prevent everything "bad". But their target market is age 13. Roblox is working on an AI that can bring down the ban hammer within 100ms after someone says a bad word. They already have a huge number of outsourced "moderators".

Second Life has a tiny "governance" team, and most of what they deal with involves land encroachment and such, plus occasional blatant griefing. Second Life runs on property rights. Be a jerk in a club, and the club owner can ban you. But Linden Lab won't. They call that a "resident to resident dispute". This works reasonably well in practice.

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” - Benjamin Franklin. If you want total safety, the price is a fascist system with an army of minimum-wage goons with ban hammers.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

1 hour ago, Candide LeMay said:

You mean Mojo Linden?

Oops, correct.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

8 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

You go to the same meetings as I. You know there is no hope. None. Absolutely none.

You're probably not wrong.

There's a faint glimmer of hope. The new VP of Engineering, Wulf Linden, does not seem to have bought into the Linden Lab company mindset that nothing can be done. For years, the technical management had convinced top management that the existing code base was unfixable. So LL made Sansar rather than improving Second Life. That, for those who came in late, was a resounding flop. User counts in low 2 digits.

Wulf is pushing to improve Second Life viewer performance substantially. Enough people inside and outside of LL have worked on the viewer code that we know it can be modified. We'll see how that goes.

 

[Does Second Life plan to create its own cryptocurrency?]

Reaction to the first major game to try NFTs. Gamers Do Not Want.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

1 hour ago, Ardy Lay said:

So, that's all downloaded prior to viewing it?  Hmm.  Hey, if I walk through a scene instead of motoring through it at 70 MPH, and it be presented well with remote storage?

That they don't do yet. The scene shown is streaming in from a SSD drive. UE5 has the beginnings of remote streaming, but it's not all there yet. Probably UE6.

For planning purposes, I'd say that 2024 is the year that virtual worlds get really good.

• Epic should have their metaverse-capable Unreal Engine out by then.
• Roblox has 90 dev teams, with several hundred developers, working on improving their system.
• Because of the current chip shortage, all the IC makers are building new fabs, (many hundreds of billions of dollars worth) and a semiconductor glut and lower prices are predicted for around 2024. So GPU availability and price will improve.
• Facebook will probably have something.
• Some of the people making "metaverse" noise will actually deliver.

We'll have to see if Linden Lab can keep up.

(How UE5 does it is clever, and, surprisingly, not all that complicated. There's been a theory breakthrough. It's basically a new mesh format and a new shader. If this were to be used for SL, the place to start would be terrain rendering. Ground rendering is probably SL's biggest weak point visually. UE5 Nanite-type ground would mean detail down to grass blades and out to the horizon. The new mesh format isn't a secret and others are writing tools to use it, so that doesn't mean using UE5 inside SL.)

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

5 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

Above all the wonderful cinematic-level graphics where it makes people believe they can live in a 60 fps ultra-resolution sci-fi movie moving smoothly without even a microsecond of lag.

Go watch the new Unreal Engine 5 "Matrix" demo. If you have a PS5, download the Unreal Engine 5 "Matrix" demo and  explore the 16 square kilometers of city. If not, here's a playthrough. This is not prerendered video. This is a screen capture of someone playing the thing on a PS5.

 

This is what a virtual world can look like.

LL needs to up their game. A lot.

 

[Does Second Life plan to create its own cryptocurrency?]

Tilia needs to figure out how to do ACH and SEPA transfers first. They're using PayPal for payouts, which adds another level of fees and problems.

(I still can't figure out what Tilia actually does. The only customers are Second Life, Sansar, and Upland. No new customers in years. Only Second Life has significant payouts. But Tilia has far more job openings than Second Life. Somebody really wants to be in the financial-services business, no matter how much it costs.)