animats

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.

That's a good observation. In the last 20 years entertainment has split strongly between XXX and PG. There's not much R any more. Nor much sexual innuendo. SL has a healthy attitude towards sex, which is refreshing. It's there if you want it and look for it. SL got this right. But it's hard to explain, because it's out of step with parts of the mainstream.

Agree. I've been looking at all the new "metaverses". They're all worse than SL so far. Notes on the competition: PBR and lighting make mediocre builds look a lot better. About 80% of the SL user base has the hardware for that, but LL is reluctant to leave people behind. Nobody else does governance well at all. SL is way ahead in the way land ownership and permissions add up to a reasonably workable world. Everybody else is thinking either dictatorship or anarchy. Part of what makes SL work is that SL is big, and space keeps everything from being in the same place. Annoyances are local. SL is the size of Greater London, and griefers can seldom annoy beyond 200 meters or so. This really matters and nobody else quite gets it. Roblox is working on the really hard technical problems, with lots of money and a big dev staff. I'm impressed with what they've accomplished. Such as solving the mesh clothing fit problem. Unfortunately, their average user age is 13 and they have 4000 censors plus an AI waiting to pounce on anyone who says a bad word. Holding hands is a no-no in Roblox. The NFT worlds get a lot of press but have tiny user counts. Most NFT art is total crap. Stuff that sells on OpenSea for US$10,000 would not sell on SL marketplace at L$100. But they get the attention? Why? The lure of Make Money Fast.

This is embarrassing. Not just for LL as a company. This makes it embarrassing to be a Second Life user. LL really needs to work on their loser public image.

New Babbage allows rezzing, but what you rez must be in theme and look good. Read the covenant.

There's an article by Matthew Ball, VC (Venture Capitalist, not Victoria Cross) in his series of metaverse articles claiming that a big change from the COVID epidemic is that it's no longer embarrassing to use a virtual world. One side effect of Facebook getting into the metaverse business is that it becomes mainstream. SL marketing should be able to exploit this. "The metaverse is here! Visit today!" (Has anyone seen any SL marketing efforts in recent months?)

If that's the plan, it's not working. Look where people are. Bellissaria, early sections. Lightly populated, mostly by people all alone. The mainland continents show about the same density this Sunday morning. Zindra. Where people get together! I have a non-adult business on Zindra, and I get enough walk-in sales to pay tier on it. I have a house on the seashore of Bellssaria, and I never see the neighbors.

From RealClearPolitics: "On June 23, 2003, Linden Labs unveiled a website called Second Life. It is a website wherein individuals can interact and live a second life as an online character, called an avatar. In 2004, several politicians held virtual press conferences in Second Life. The Maldives and Sweden opened virtual embassies. Second Life is still around, but it's now used primarily by those without social lives."

What I'd be inclined to do to the current interface is make it disappear completely until you bring the mouse pointer to the bottom or top of the window. Much like the way the controls work on YouTube videos.

This is a curse of open source programs. Customization just dumps the problem of creating a good user interface on each individual user. No, you have to get a reasonably good design and not allow too much customization. It just confuses things. Anyone remember Myspace? With customizable interfaces, tutorials and videos don't line up with what the user sees. Tutorials go out of date rapidly. Blender tutorials are famous for this. The big question in each new release of Blender is "Where did button/menu X move to?"

SL definitely seems to be in maintenance mode. There haven't been any significant new features for over a year now. Nothing comparable to animesh or EEP. The team is doing a good job of keeping the systems going, but no more than that. For LL's real priorities, see their job openings. There seems to be a management fantasy that Tilia is somehow going to take off, despite several years of no new customers. Someday, there may be a book or a Harvard Business School study, "How Linden Lab built the Metaverse and blew it". Like how Sears blew it in online commerce, how Western Union blew it in data communications, and how Xerox blew it in personal computers. Each was there first, and then their management blew a leading position in the next big industry.

I'm using WGPU, which is a Rust cross-platform wrapper for Vulkan. On Linux, it's basically a pass through to Vulkan. It can also do that on Windows, where it talks to Vulkan or DX11 or DX12. (You get to pick. Some of the options work.) On Mac, it translates to Apple's Metal, which is comparable to Vulkan, but Apple just had to Think Different and annoy everybody writing graphics software. WGPU is maybe half complete. Right now it can't do rigged mesh, or some of the fancier shader stuff, or all the targets. For C++ land, there's something called MoltenVK, which is basically a translation layer from Vulkan to Apple's Metal. LL could conceivably use that. Haven't looked at it in detail. Unreal Engine works cross platform, but at a higher level than Vulkan. To use that, you basically have to do things their way. Plus pay them 5% of your revenue once you past $1M. Unity has something similar, I think. This sort of thing is why Mac support for many 3D programs comes later, if at all.

I want to think about that one some more. I've argued for slightly tighter mainland zoning. There's potential for innovation in land layout and use. But I don't want armies of oursourced jackbooted thugs on the prowl for anything that might upset somebody. Facebook does. See the infamous Horizon Safety video. Roblox has an average user age of 13, so they have the "protect the children" problem. They're trying to develop an AI system which can muzzle anyone who says anything bad within a tenth of a second. They're also cracking down on holding hands. Really. Don't push too hard for authoritarian control. You might get it.

Right. So far, I've read about a hundred of "My First Metaverse Article". Most are either clueless or awful. Or worse, trying to find suckers to put money into something. The one on PC Gamer (UK) is the best one so far.

SL map tiles used to be at: https://secondlife-maps-cdn.akamaized.net/map-NNN-objects.jpg but no longer are. That got lost some time during "uplift". Is there a new tile location?

Oh, that's good to know. Because that does influence how the lighting works.