animats

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.

Shrinking a mesh to fit inside another mesh at a specified distance is a reasonably hard problem. I had to code that once. You can't just downscale the mesh. For complex objects a downscaled mesh will have some surfaces in the wrong places. Moving each face inward results in the geometry changing. Some triangles, edges, and vertices can disappear. You have to figure out what to do about parts of the mesh thinner than twice the shrink distance, since having them disappear and have no physics model is no good. There's no perfect solution to that. So, that's probably why they didn't do it.

That's worth knowing. Convex hull collisions are cheap to compute, but that's a server-side cost, and in SL, we tend not to have big piles of colliding objects anyway. And, right, the Havok system doesn't allow hulls to touch. However, you can't get two basic mesh cubes in prim mode to stack without a gap. Works with prims only. I suspect that the collision model for prims was manually tweaked to get that right. The big advantage of hulls is that, since they're actual volumes, the collision detection works better. You don't get those "stuck under the landscape object" problems. You'll be kicked out of a convex hull. And you don't get those weird situations that result from hitting a collision surface edge-on. Because I do SL vehicles, I'm very aware of those kinds of problems.

No. It explains Second Life's marketing problem, though. I wonder if and when a metaverse product will break out of that niche. So far, Facebook has tried three times (Oculus, Spaces, and Horizon) and none went mainstream. The closest thing to a mainstream metaverse product right now is Roblox, with over a million concurrent users, and their average user age is 13. It took a long time, but video games eventually did break out and go mainstream. Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist who writes at length about the metaverse, says a similar breakout happened for virtual worlds last year due to the COVID epidemic. Having most of your human interactions via computers is now socially acceptable, he says. We're seeing a little of that on the business side, with products like Breakroom. Breakroom, by the way, is just good old SineSpace with business-type spaces. You can do that in SL, of course, but the setup is too hard for casual use.

The physics engine works best if it has convex hulls to work on. (A convex hull is a polyhedron with no "dents". Like shrink-wrap.) The physics engine will try to deal with what's called a "polygon soup" of random triangles if that's what you give it, but convex hulls collide better because they have a clear inside and outside. This prevents some situations which can get you stuck in a wall. Confusing the issue is that SL has several convex hull options. The one in prim properties puts a convex hull around the entire object. That's the big hammer of SL physics - don't get inside this thing at all. It's good for rocks and such, things you never get inside of, even partially. Simple and efficient. But you can also create convex hulls in the mesh uploader. Beq Janus made the upload window resizable in Firestorm, so you can make it big enough to see what's going on. There's a thing in the uploader called the convex hull decomposer. It's from Havok. It will try to break an arbitrary object into a set of convex hulls which roughly add up to the original object. Unfortunately, it's not too smart. If you put in "wall with door opening", you ought to get two pieces of wall and a door lintel. But you'll probably get a bunch of wedge-shaped pieces that add up to your original shape. This is the reason for putting small spaces in the physics model; it's to prevent the clueless convex hull decomposer from generating a badly chosen set of hulls. It won't join pieces across a gap. The various parameters for analyzing and optimizing the physics model are useful if used with a big upload window. Then you can see the choices being made. The window updates as you move the sliders. Try to get rectangular solids, rather than wedges, and the physics model will work better. Two back to back wedges tend to result in flaky behavior like being stuck between them. Triangle meshes used as collision objects have some gotchas.The physics engine has no idea what "inside" means for a random piece of mesh. So it's possible to get stuck inside an object. Non-watertight triangle meshes used as physics objects may behave strangely, since they are ambiguous about what's inside. Clean your meshes before uploading. (llCastRay uses the physics engine, and my NPCs use llCastRay. Sometimes my NPCs will walk right through something, because its physics model has big gaps. When they do, an avatar can walk through the same place. I've seen too many vehicles like that. Too often you can walk through the hood area.)

Rosedale: “If you live a comfortable life in New York City and you’re young and healthy, you probably are going to choose to live there. If I offer you the life of an avatar, you’re just not going to use it very much. On the other hand, if you live in a rural location with very little social contact, are disabled or live in an authoritarian environment where you don’t feel free to speak, then your avatar can become your primary identity."

Decentraland has a 3D world you can visit. It's Upland that's just a map.

A nice project would be to make some sales barges and sail them up to various Bellessaria docks on a regular schedule. You only get 32 LI per vehicle, and someone, or a bot, needs to stay with it. You can still have vendors and a few samples and pictures, plus teleports to mainstores. That would be a way to try out stores near Belli.

Nothing you do with Open Simulator will affect Second Life, and vice versa. They are totally disconnected. Open Simulator is mostly, but not fully, compatible with Second Life. Mesh uploads should work. Scripts should mostly work. Open Simulator is a completely different implementation. All different code, written by different people, in a different programing language. It uses (mostly) the same network messages and asset formats as Second Life, so the viewers are (mostly) compatible. You have to ask, via support ticket, for access to the beta grid. I don't think you have to have a premium membership, but it helps, because ticket response is faster. Syncing between the beta grid (Aditi) and the main grid (Agni) has been semi-broken for years. If you ask via ticket for a manual sync, you can usually get one.

Luna Oaks has active stores. I'd never seen that part of Bay City before. The trolley is kind of cute, too. There's a nice Linden mall in Mosh. It's not doing well. Dead mall in Mosh. One of the big landlords bought up most of the stores and raised the rent. There are very few tenants left. Just a big, empty structure in a nice location in downtown Kama City at the port. Downtown Kama City is an example of how not to do it. It looks like a nice downtown. There's a port on the river. There's the mall shown above. There's a nice park with dog runs and a cafe. There's a plaza with a big obelisk. There are two big bridges. There's open space along the river. There's an info hub. Only the info hub is used, and that mostly because it's a default destination for lost 'bots. The rest sees almost no usage. It's hard to do a mall in SL and get traffic. You can build it, but few will come. Visit Bruissac, which is a beautiful build on the Blake Sea, a port with boat slips, the headquarters of GTFO, and Drivers of SL. It doesn't get much better than that. Over half the stores are vacant. Does SL have a successful mall developer and operator with a track record of successful multi-tenant malls?

Reuters article: Virtual real estate plot sells for record $2.4 million "In June, a plot of virtual land in Decentraland sold for 1,295,000 MANA, worth $913,228 at the time. The buyers built a virtual shopping centre to sell digital clothing, but Reuters has visited this site multiple times since and not seen any shoppers."

You'd have to go through all the legal procedures to set up a real-world entity to be a REIT, I expect. SL has corporate landowners. Some are non-profits, some are for profit. There are universities and medical centers with land in SL. CasperTech is a UK company. At one time, IBM had whole islands. So this isn't new. Some of the bigger landlords are probably incorporated already. I'd prefer not to see the financialization of SL land. In some "metaverses", the action involves flipping land, not using it for anything. Decentraland is like that, and Upland is that in pure form - Upland is buying and selling plots on a map. SL land is more useful. Land is a means to an end, not an end in itself. So, while it's technically and probably legally possible to go there, let's not.

If you really wanted to, you could set up a virtual real estate investment trust to own land in SL. I wonder if one of the big SL landlords which buys up SL land, keeps it vacant, and prices it too high to rent or sell is some kind of REIT with corporate funding. But SL land is not scarce. Pay US$349.00 once and $229 a month and Linden Lab will start up a new region for you.

Currently, you can resell items within SL that have the "transfer" privilege. There's a market in that. As I mentioned previously, it's technically possible to implement an NFT-type system that would prevent you from having the same object in SL and an Open Simulator grid at the same time, but would allow transferring them back and forth. But probably not worth the trouble. The practical problems are: The cost and overhead of doing anything on the Ethereum blockchain is more than most SL items sell for. Most existing NFTs are of such low quality that they would be laughed off SL. Really. This is a typical piece of NFT artwork. You can own Sheep #10687 for only US$14,904. Yes, most NFT art is that crappy. And yes, those are all machine-generated variations on the same design. Place your bids now, suckers. (1 Ethereum = 4,320.38 US Dollar, as of a few minutes ago.) People buy these in hopes of finding a bigger sucker to buy from them. If you look at the listings closely, you find people asking high prices for "used" items, but those items are not getting bids. The actual prices at which sales take place are far lower. Many transactions are "wash sales"; the seller is selling to themself to pump up the listed price. The items shown above almost certainly have bids like that. Beanie Babies on eBay work exactly like this. High asking prices, no bids, few resales, and those resales are at low prices. NFTs are the same concept.

Useful references in that situation.

LL might actually be lurching toward solving the "too hard" problem. First, there are viewer speedups coming from LL, per the Lindens at the last content creators meeting. Maybe as fast as 2x-3x. Also, on the Firestorm side, automatic quality adjustment to keep the frame rate up is coming. There's interest in doing simplified rendering of distant avatars, or forcing them to impostor mode. This would relieve a pain point for new users. Plus, multi-thread loading of assets is already in test. As is getting the 2D UI out of the main render thread. The overall effect should be to get viewer performance into acceptable gamer range. (All this is independent of the stuff I've been working on in Rust, which is much further away.) Second, LL seems to be becoming aware that Roblox has solved the clothing layer fit problem and they might have to catch up. That's a tough retrofit for SL; Roblox is adding layered clothing; they didn't have it. But now that somebody did it, we can look at how. Also, it' easier to sell management on catching up with a competitor than doing something new. Third, the destination guide has been improving. There's more fun stuff listed. This will help new users answer the "what do I do now" question. Those are the three big new user pain points.

Those are so last-cen.