animats

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oops, correct.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.)

I know. I love the big, detailed mainland builds integrated with the surrounding area. That was one of the best. That' s what SL mainland is supposed to be about.

A "wash sale". A criminal offense for securities, common for collectables.

Oh, definitely. Take the yacht's file in Blender and export it as GLTF format. OpenSea accepts GLTF. That will have all the meshes and textures, but not the scripts. Provide lots of nice pictures. Pay the minting and listing fees there to list it. Set up a web site with this video. Add some clip art with images of money, and lots of NFT boilerplatee. Tell buyers that if they buy it, they get a no-copy version usable in Second Life, too. Make up a version for the NFT with a different color scheme than you usually sell in SL. In fact, you can sell different colored and patterned versions as "uniques", so if it sells, make more. Let us know how it works out, please.

If you're running a land rental business, you can deduct your tier as a business expense, of course. I assume the big landowners do that. More paperwork, but routine.

More nearby parcels that served the airport are under ban lines, and will probably go down soon. There are tracks and roads to nowhere now.

You mean "buy" from the estate manager, not from LL, correct?

Stargate. Now in the Back to the Future courthouse square. What destinations are available? How do I click on it? Just wait until we have AR.

There was someone at the Open Simulator conference a few days ago who was talking about NFTs for that side of the world. But she hadn't gotten very far. NFTs make more sense on the Open Simulator side than on the Second Life side, because Open Simulator has multiple grids under different ownership. It's possible to move things from grid to grid, and making sure that was a move, not a copy, is tough. One way to do ownership checking for objects to have a script which "phones home" to a server that tracks object locations. On rez, and maybe once a day, each object would phone home to make sure it was the only copy. If an object was told by the server that there was more than one copy, the object would first send out warning messages, and after a while, all but one copy would delete itself. You could have copies in inventory on multiple grids, but rez on two grids and one copy will disappear. If the script for this is part of another script which the object needs to operate, it's going to be difficult to remove this copy protection without making the object useless. It would also be possible to check authenticity of the objects of others with a HUD or security orb that obtained the object data (which you can do from a script) and checked with the database. The amusing form of this would be a security orb for nightclubs which detects an unauthorized copy of a luxury item, focuses spotlights on the offending item, screams "FAKE", and ejects the offender. Now, one way to implement this would be to use a blockchain as the ownership database. That allows you to resell objects outside of world and have the sale enforced in world. That's where NFTs fit into this. To sell someone something, you have to both transfer ownership on a blockchain and send them the object. It should be tied into a vendor system where, after buying the NFT on chain, you go to a delivery terminal and get it delivered to you. The former owner's copy will then be deleted by its own script. Then you can rez and admire the precious. I have no interest in doing this, but if someone else wants to, go for it. You might be able to make some money. Get some good creators on board, and this would lead to better NFTs than the terrible pixelated art currently for sale on OpenSea. It could make SL attractive to the cool kids with money. Or maybe nobody will buy your US$5000 purses.

I should probably use OBS for recording for public release. Mostly I just record video for debug purposes, and sometimes edit that into something to show. Right now, the lower levels (Rend3, WGPU, some other stuff) aren't working right for cross-compile from Linux, so I can't yet build for Windows easily. Yes, the normal viewers are doing more work. The render loop, though, is on a CPU by itself, not slowed down by what the rest of the program is doing. There's no magic here. It's just routine modern rendering technology. Now, UE5, that's magic. Probably by UE6 or so you'll be able to use that for an virtual world viewer. UE5 still requires too much asset prep with UE tools. Avatars are still tough. Haven't gotten there yet. WGPU doesn't do rigged mesh yet. This is a long way from release.

There's Robin Wood's Photoshop template for making SL T-shirts. If you can use Photoshop, this isn't difficult to use.

Live, it runs about 55 FPS on an AMD Ryzen 5 with an NVidia 3070. Linux 20.04 LTS. The video capture isn't full speed, because Kazaam, the capture program, can't keep up. Shadows are not prebaked. Sun only, though. Shadow crawling was a problem in an earlier version of Rend3, but has been fixed. Asset loading from server isn't full speed yet. Using a JPEG 2000 decoder from Rust is currently a problem, and the decoder is currently a command-line decoder running in subprocesses. That's a temporary solution. Here's what startup currently looks like with loading delays visible: http://www.animats.com/sl/misc/accessmalltest.mp4 That's an early test, not final. As you get closer to objects, their loading priority increases and the priority queue is updated, so you get the high-detail version fast as you approach something. There was an LL attempt to do that in the SL viewer years ago, but it was abandoned.

The "digital luxury" sector is now a thing, says McKinsey, the consulting firm. Somebody may be able to use this in Second Life. There are many people talking about "metaverse" and "branding", although few are doing much.