animats

Please post a picture of the Grand Moat. I want to see that. Are there sharks or alligators in the moat?

There goes the neighborhood.

The most efficient way would be to construct a string of lights with all the bulbs on the same face, but at different places in UV space. Then set up texture animation in UV space to scroll some long narrow texture past all the faces. Texture animation is nice for this because there's no script load - the viewer does all the work.

Like many of the best parts of SL, it's a niche that someone undertook to do well. Others include the Blake Sea area, the Fruit Islands, the City-State of New Babbage, and the Confederation of Democratic Simulators.

If you want themed region in an adult area, check out Aurora Town. It's most of the Paceglen region of Zindra. They rent houses. Not too expensive. The residential sections look much like Belli. There's also a commercial district. If someone built what you wanted, it would probably look like this. (Aurora Town used to be larger, but they seem to have downsized. They had a private monorail system and more commercial buildings. Now the area is surrounded by vacant lots with rental boxes from the usual landlord.)

In theory, yes. I've written about this before. But NFT land is so full of flakes and scammers that I wouldn't want to be involved with that. I'm all in favor of building better 3D metaverses. What I want to see is something as general as Second Life, as open as Open Simulator, as good looking as a modern AAA title, and with a frame rate high enough for VR headgear. I fear that all the NFT scams, when they collapse, will give the metaverse concept such a bad name it will be years before anyone tries to solve the hard problems. I get three views of the Metaverse. First, the SL view, from people who spend time in something that pretty much does what the metaverse is supposed to do. It's just too sluggish and too hard to use. Second, the Reddit view, which is dominated by the "make money fast" crowd. Third, the game developer view, where there are long discussions about how Epic gets all that detail with Nanite and why the Spatial OS approach to big seamless worlds didn't work out. And, on the game dev side, the big unanswered question - how do we make the metaverse fun? This, of course, is SL's problem. The world itself just sits there. We have to make our own fun. For a sizable fraction of the population, that either takes up too much time or is beyond their abilities. Even if developers get the technology up to the Reader Player One level, will we just be wandering through a big empty world that looks better than SL and has less lag?

This change breaks my experimental Rust viewer, too. But I can tell from my logs what went wrong, and updated the JIRA for BUG-231530.

I didn't discover all that. Most items in that list were done by someone else in some vehicle script, although not all together. But few creators gave out details. Here are my vehicle scripts for my motorcycles. They've been available there for years. License is GPL, so you can use them in any free vehicle. No support, though. For commercialization, we have to talk. I want vehicles in SL to Just Work. If you can't travel around, there's no point in having a big seamless world.

Yes. After a vehicle's region crossing is complete, with the vehicle and all avatars in the new region, it helps to do all of the following: Check that you have all the needed perms and re-acquire them if necessary. Set camera. Set animations. Set sounds. Also useful: When the vehicle crosses (CHANGED_REGION event), turn off physics to force a hard stop. Wait for all avatars to arrive. (Typical delay, about 50-100ms, but can be longer in overloaded sims.) Turn physics back on. Set velocity vector to velocity saved when physics was turned off. And even: When vehicle root coords go outside 0..256, set a hover height to avoid sinkage. (No more sinking into the road at badly constructed region crossings.) At end of region crossing, turn off hover mode. And also: Check for path which will cross two region boundaries in a short period and slow down vehicle. And finally: If avatars don't arrive within 15-30 seconds, turn vehicle off. And in the Firestorm viewer: Set Preferences->Move & View -> Movement -> Region crossing movement prediction -> Stop when error gets too large With all this, region crossings are either successes, or the immersion breaking total fail where the avatar failed to cross and is stuck. Which is why I keep bringing up the total fail case at Server User Group. Can't work around that from LSL.

Yes.IRS: "$3.5 B Cryptocurrency Seized in 2020". The IRS has the cryptocurrency thing figured out. Even people who tried really hard to remain anonymous and avoided using "reputable" exchanges have been caught. Answering "no" to that question and being in an IRS database as having a crypto account somewhere is going to be detected.

Something is badly wrong, and it's not your fault. File a JIRA. Give the "about" info from the viewer for both viewers. Mention how many times you've seen this. Can you reproduce it on request? Scripts should have no effect on this. Anyone else seeing this?

Many crypto people think that. They're wrong. https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/irs-turns-to-data-analytics-to-track-crypto-tax-evasion

There's a built-in sort, llListSort. So you can sort both lists and then do a sequential match. How much data is involved? What you're trying to do here is beat O(N^2). You can do this, and get down to O(N log N). But for small N, it may not be worth it. If you have 10 items in each list, just do the nested loops. If you have 1000, start working on the heavy machinery in LSL. if you have 10,000, connect to an external server with a database and tell it to do a join.

A furry view of NFTs, from Luca Grabacr.

I know about that. I went over to that sim and chatted with the owner. What he's actually selling is a sort of "breedable", in the Pokemon card sense, not the Second Life sense. You don't actually get a robot in SL, and the ones he has on display just stand there. Go to "Universe v2" and see for yourself. It's just someone outside SL with a store in SL for something outside SL, with some displays in SL. That's been done before. It won't affect SL.

Yes. The language is trivial. It's the interaction with the world that's complicated. The main thing to realize about doing things to the world from LSL is that you're not running the world. You get to ask to do things to it. You can tell an object to move, and it usually will. But you can't be sure. Someone might be editing it from a viewer. If it's physical, it might hit something and be stopped. It might hit a ban line and be stopped. It might try to go off the edge of the world or into an offline sim. Some kinds of movement commands are approximate, not exact. The other big thing to realize is that doing things takes time. Many LSL calls return before the requested action is complete. Rezzing objects, in particular, can be slow. Moving objects is not instantaneous. Even things like color changes have a visible delay before they appear in the viewer, because a network message has to go out to the viewer. So you have to view LSL commands like robotics. You issue a command, and you check later to see what happened.

The ERIA city area, with the big airport and tram system, apparently reverted to LL. It's now owned by a Linden and ban lines are up. The tram system is still trying to run but hits the ban lines and stops. Sad. That was one of the nicer city big city builds on mainland.

I just went to Brown. "There is no covenant provided for this estate". There's a notecard dispenser that gives out "Brown Zoning Guidelines" notecards from 2003, owned by Michael Linden. There's a dead mall with vacant stalls. There are overpriced vacant lots owned by the usual suspects. There are a few houses. It's mostly owned by the usual landlords for vacant properties, with prices around L$30/m^2. Nobody but me is in the region, or any adjacent region. That's Brown. So, not a good model to copy.

There are themed areas in SL. New Babbage probably has the strictest covenant, with a building code and building inspection. It works. I'd like to see a few terms from the Bellessaria covenant extended to mainland. Mostly the restrictions on altitudes for skyboxes and timing of security orbs. This has to stop. I'd like to see LL offer isolated regions for skybox stacks. Those things need to get off mainland.

That's what grinds me about the crypto world. It's become all make-money-fast, money laundering, tax evasion, or Ponzi schemes. The criminal use cases have pushed out the legit ones. Originally Bitcoin was supposed to be a convenient medium of exchange for online transactions. Nobody does that much any more. I was looking into NFT technology as a way to get unique object portability between Second Life and the various Open Simulator grids. A script that crosschecks with the blockchain would prevent rezzing a no-copy object in two different grids. People could have duplicate detectors which checked nearby objects for being properly registered on the blockchain. It's technically possible. But NFT projects are so scammy that it's not worth the trouble to do something legit.

As I pointed out, it's quite possible for a SL user to add NFTs to Second Life. Well, Someone did. Not LL, a third party. They're "robots". Two of them are on display in region "Universe v2", as bot avatars. It's just a static display. Nothing going on there yet.

As others have said, that's what Zindra and Horizons are for. Horizons is interesting. It has a mid-century futuristic theme, allows adult content, and offers double prims. But prices are insane. Waterfront property on the ocean for L$299,000 for 8192m^2. If you want land in Zindra, it's very available, but expensive. L$10 to L$20 per square meter for sort of OK locations. Much higher for really good ones. Predrow, on the ocean. 8192m^2 for L$910,000. 2x prims. Watch the sun rise over the ocean. I can see why people want something a little less pricey.

The virtual land boom in NFT land is fake. With NFTs, you can boost the visible price by selling them to yourself at a high price. This is called a "wash sale". That's considered illegal market manipulation for stocks but is legal for collectables. It's very common for NFTs. If you look on OpenSea, you see a stalled market. Huge prices, low bids, and no transactions. Beanie Babies on eBay work exactly the same way, as I point out occasionally. Asking prices around $5000, actual sales around $50. (This is going to backfire badly on US persons trading NFTs once they figure out the tax implications. Pumping up the price with a fake transaction may result on being taxed on the pumped-up price.) Reuters reports that the plot of land in Decentraland sold for 24 million, intended for a mall, gets no visitors. They sent someone to log into the world a few times and check. The whole artificial-scarcity NFT thing is collapsing. The only part that is likely to survive is selling merch to fans. That only works if you're already famous enough to have fans that buy your merchandise. Nike shoes, NBA team merch, that sort of thing.

I'm in Bronlen right now. The map shows it as down, but I was able to walk into the region without problems. But I can't teleport into Bronlen. So the world is up, but teleports are broken. Update: The map just cleared and I just teleported into Bronlen.

I'll probably pay $50 and go, since I follow this stuff. The presenter list is weak. Nobody from Roblox or Facebook/Meta or VRChat or NVidia or Autodesk or Epic or any major game development shop.