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animats

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  1. The Washington Post has some Metaverse coverage today. It's mostly about Tim Sweeney talking about Epic. Epic is making lots of noise about an "open metaverse", because they are annoyed with Apple trying to take a 30% cut of their revenue. But Fortnite takes a much bigger cut from creators. Someone commented on the Post article:
  2. Oh, good, a map of Belli with rez zones. We need more of those.
  3. The owner of that has reportedly been ill, and that project is unfinished. You can get from the south end of that railway to an unmarked water rez zone, if you can find it,, and then, with difficulty, get out to open water. squeezing between obstacles and ban lines. It's also possible to make the trip in an amphibious vehicle with good off-road capability. But it's not easy.
  4. You can do that! It's called NVIdia Omniverse. It's a way for people to work collaboratively in 3D tools including Blender, Maya, and Photoshop. Anyone tried this? It could be useful to creators who collaborate remotely.
  5. This is why the SLRR needs a track geometry car. Something which reports all such problems in a useful way. Something both users and moles could use.
  6. Given the limitations of the Bellissaria rail system, maybe most rail vehicles should be trams, rather than multi-car trains. The famous PCC streetcar. This is a 3D model from CG Trader, potentially convertible to Second Life use. It's a good streetcar for Bellessaria tracks. Although long, it has a short wheelbase and a surprisingly tight turning radius. San Francisco still runs these. It's a good fit for a suburban neighborhood. The rare double-ended variant. No need to turn it around. Nice for track systems which lack turnaround loops.
  7. There's much interest in asset portability. The trouble is, the interest is from people who want to sell assets, not those who own them. There are several approaches. Outsourcing. Ready Player Me is an avatar system where the company behind Ready Player Me sells avatars and clothing, and there's an API which can be put into games to render them. All clothing changes are done via the Ready Player Me site. They have this working on about a hundred second and third tier games, but the major game companies are thus far uninterested. Non-fungible tokens. NFTs are technically interesting. They're basically a way to make no-copy objects and track who owns them. Or at least being able to detect the copy. Unfortunately, the entire field has been taken over the make-money-fast crowd and the Ponzi schemers. Assets as a service. Some big central service (Amazon? Valve?) stores assets for multiple games and virtual worlds. They're really copy protection schemes. Yes. I haven't looked at USD format that deeply, but Blender supports it now, and some SL creators I know speak well of it. NVidia and Khronos are suporting it. Disney and Pixar defined it. It's powerful enough for Hollywood. This is one of the more promising developments.
  8. Today is Monday, and the announcement is out. Facebook announced the "XR Programs and Research Fund", a $50 million fund that it says will help it develop the metaverse "more responsibly". So, no big product announcement.
  9. There's a little more control over the avatar. But anything driven by an LSL script only gets fake arrow key inputs.
  10. While you can hook a joystick to SL, it doesn't do much. All it does for vehicles is activate the arrow keys. There's no proportional control. You can't fly any better with it.
  11. I didn't think the new mesh optimizer was in yet. I know it's not in Firestorm 6.4.21. Maybe in some project viewer.
  12. I went to Governance every few months, for the same reason I'd go to a city council meeting once a year or so. It's good to keep an eye on the people who think they're in charge. You could discuss things such as just how annoying do mainland ad boards have to get before they should be removed. Governance was boring. That meant things were working.
  13. There's been discussion of age verification for SL recently, so SL could get on Twitch. Roblox is preparing to do it. Age Verification comes in two stages. First, an ID document check, and then a selfie match. On the Roblox app, users start by scanning their ID card, driver’s license, or passport. Roblox uses advanced image processing technology to validate the document’s legitimacy. From there, the user is asked to capture a selfie to check for “liveness” and “likeness.” Liveness ensures that the person is a living, breathing individual taking the selfie (rather than just a static image of a person), and likeness ensures that the person in the selfie is the same person as the face on the ID document. The entire process is automated and usually takes seconds to get a result after images are captured. It will be available globally in over 180 countries on both mobile and desktop for anyone 13 years of age or older with a government-issued ID or passport. Verification will initially be required for creators and voice users. Roblox is mostly kids, but they want more adults. This is how they're going to keep them separate. Tencent has been doing this for a while now. They validate against China's national ID. That's how the time limits on gaming for kids works. Not sure if it's a good idea, but it seems to be the coming thing from the big players. Should SL do this?
  14. What we have so far is a statement by Mojo Linden that there will be, for now, a focus on "performance". OK. That's reasonable enough. SL is so slow that it's laughed off gamer sites for that reason alone. Near term, performance could be visibly improved by having the viewers target a frame rate, automatically reducing view distance and quality settings if the draw cycle is using up too much the CPU time. Never dropping below 20 FPS is a reasonable goal. That's mostly cosmetic, but easy to do and useful. New users are not going to tweak the graphics settings manually. Nor should they have to. Beyond that, it gets harder. There's much that could be done, but few easy fixes.
  15. Start with a boat at the dock at Rigamarole, and head due south to the new Fantasy regions of Bellessaria. The weather effects are impressive.
  16. I''m curious to see what the new guy does first. What he says publicly means little at this point. On the technical front, I don't see measuring complexity for land impact purposes as the crucial issue. It's more useful to deal with complexity by automatically adjusting level of detail of both textures and meshes to maintain roughly equal detail per screen pixel. I've demoed this experimentally for textures. That approach deals with legacy content. (Wrong topic to discuss the technical issues. I've been discussing this on GameDev, which is a more technical forum.)
  17. There's a lot of anger here. Some of it justified, some not. Let's review the big issues. Not enough investment in the LL platform, while over-investment in unsuccessful side projects. SL is profitable. But the profits are not going into improving SL. LL has convinced itself that SL cannot be fixed. There is a "can't do" attitude internally, recognized by users who attend the various user group meetings. The path for new users is too hard. Anyone doubting this should spend a few hours at Firestorm Help Island. Things that are easy to set up on some other platforms are hard in SL. You can have meetings in SL, and people do this, but it's hard to set them up if presentations are involved. You can set up role playing games in SL, but you have to build your own role-playing system to do so. Non-problems: A system with user-created content has to be slow. Not really. That's a problem with the viewer architecture and implementation, which is 1999 technology, not the content. All that high-detail content is an asset. It just needs better automated processing for efficient display. (I've written about what can be done, I've implemented some demos, and anyone who wants to discuss the technicalities of this can message me.) Nothing can be done because the code base is so old. The third party viewer developers don't seem to have a huge problem with this. (I've put code in Firestorm myself. The viewer code is under-commented, but the original architecture is rather clever.) Those are excuses, not real problems. That summarizes the big issues. Comments?
  18. "Ping", as measured by SL viewers, is bogus info. It's timed based on the point in the frame cycle when the network gets read. Low frame rate forces high displayed "ping time", regardless of what the network is doing. High ping time by itself does not force low frame rate.
  19. With the 960 people they already have. This doesn't include "moderators". Moderation is apparently outsourced to IEnergizer in India. Roblox's average user age is 13, and they put a huge amount of effort into being kid-safe. One of SL's strengths is that, because of the powers of landowners to eject and ban people, SL only needs a tiny governance group. Because of SL's policy of not caring what people do on their own land if it doesn't impact the neighbors, there's no need for much censorship. Which is why a Roblox-run metaverse is not what SL users want. They already attracted enough investment. On March 10, 2021, Roblox went public via an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Ticker symbol RBLX. Current market cap US$46.20 billion. SEC S-1 filing. Not clear how this plays out. 150 more developers would be a mess for Second Life. The level of effort applied to Sansar or Tilia, applied well to Second Life, could turn things around.
  20. Bellessaria is upscale, and high elves are upscale. Gnomes and trolls are working class.
  21. Will Soma FM run in Google Chromium? Not Chrome, Chromium, the open source version. That's the browser inside SL viewers. It doesn't have any proprietary DRM systems.
  22. To move forward, Linden Lab needs more developers. Here's the current list of open Linden Lab jobs for Second Life. Customer Account Specialist, Second Life Customer Support Representative Senior Product Manager, Second Life None of those involve software development. Here's the current list of open Roblox jobs in engineering only: (Product, art, operations, administration, finance, etc. not listed.) Senior ML Engineer - Bots & Spam Backend Engineer - Global Infra Build Engineer - Game Engine Core Systems C++ CORE Software Engineer Client Platform IT Engineer Computational Geometry Software Engineer - C++ Computer Graphics Engineer, Avatar Emotion Continuous Deployment Platform Engineer Deep Learning Engineer, Avatar Emotion DevOps Engineer DevOps Software Engineer, Studio Engineering Manager - Application Platform Engineering Manager - Big Data Infrastructure Team Engineering Manager - Economy Engineering Manager - Game Engine Languages Engineering Manager - Game Engine Systems Engineering Manager - Native Foundation Engineering Manager - Roblox Studio Engineering Manager - Studio SDLC Engineering Manager, Native Foundation - Services Engineering Manager, Social Communications Engineering Manager, Storage Platform (Cache) Engineering Manager- Microservice Platform Engineering Manager- Microservice Platform Frontend Engineer - Developer Services Gameplay Automation/QA Engineer InfoSec - Security Software Engineer InfoSec - Systems Security Engineer Lead Analytical Data Engineer Lead Gameplay Engineer - Reference team Machine Learning Technical Director - Game Engine Network Capacity Engineer Network Operations Engineer Platform Engineer, Global Infra Principal Backend Engineer, Avatar Core Services Principal Backend Engineer-Avatar Marketplace Principal FE Engineer, Co-Experience Principal Front-End Software Engineer - Trust & Safety Principal Graphics Engineer, Avatar Emotion Principal ML Software Engineer - Game Engine Security Principal Software Engineer Principal Software Engineer - App Experience Principal Software Engineer - Application Platform Principal Software Engineer - Cloud Platform Principal Software Engineer - Data Access Principal Software Engineer - Growth Core Principal Software Engineer - Matchmaking Principal Software Engineer - Trust & Safety Principal Software Engineer - UI Editor Principal Software Engineer - Universal Content Principal Software Engineer, Avatar Gameplay - C++ Principal Software Engineer, Avatar Motion - C++ Principal Software Engineer, Social Connections QA Automation Engineer - Universal Apps Rendering Automation Engineer Research Scientist Roblox OS Full Stack Senior Engineer Roblox OS Lead Data Engineer SRE - Network Traffic Senior / Principal ML Engineer - Account Security Senior / Principal Software Engineer - Account Security Senior Analytical Data Engineer - Experimentation Senior Animation Engineer Senior Backend Engineer - Avatar Marketplace Senior Backend Software Engineer - Growth Platform Senior Capacity Planning Engineer Senior Data Engineer - Growth Acquisition & Activation Senior Data Engineer, Data Infrastructure Senior Engineering Manager, Collaborative Development Senior Engineering Manager-Avatar Core Services Senior Full Stack Application Engineer, Global Infra Senior Full Stack Engineer - Account Integrity Senior Full Stack Engineer - China Core Senior Full Stack Software Engineer - Growth Senior Full Stack Web Engineer Senior Game AI Software Engineer - Simulation - C++ Senior Game Networking Engineer Senior Game Rendering Software Engineer - C++ Senior Gameplay Engineer - Reference Team Senior Gameplay Engineer, Avatar Senior Graphics Engineer, Avatar Emotion Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Game Discovery Senior Manager, Test Tools and Infrastructure Senior Mobile Software Engineer - Notifications Platform Senior Search Ranking Engineer Senior Search Software Engineer, Backend Senior Software Engineer (Backend) - Developer Services Resources Senior Software Engineer (Data) - Search and Discovery Senior Software Engineer - Accounts - Identity Management Senior Software Engineer - App Experience Senior Software Engineer - Application Platform Senior Software Engineer - Bots & Spam Senior Software Engineer - Cache Senior Software Engineer - Client Application Architecture Senior Software Engineer - Content Sharing, Studio Senior Software Engineer - Data Access Senior Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure Senior Software Engineer - Developer, Content Platform Senior Software Engineer - Game Engine Languages Senior Software Engineer - Interface Senior Software Engineer - International Growth Senior Software Engineer - Personalization Senior Software Engineer - Productivity Tools Senior Software Engineer - Social Senior Software Engineer - Trust & Safety Senior Software Engineer - Universal Content Senior Software Engineer - Video Platform Senior Software Engineer, Avatar Gameplay - C++ Senior Software Engineer, Avatar Tools Senior Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure Senior Software Engineer, Economy Platform Senior Software Engineer, Payments & Fraud Senior Software Engineer, RTC Client Senior Software Engineer, Resources Senior Software Engineer, Simulation Core - C++ Senior Software Engineer, Video Playback - C++ Senior Software Engineer- Cloud Platform Senior Software Engineer- UI/UX Senior/Principal Graphics Engineer - Avatar Appearance Senior/Principal Software Engineer Senior/Principal Tools Engineer - Avatar Appearance Site Reliability Engineer Software Engineer - Data Access Software Engineer - Game Engine Core Systems Software Engineer - Game Engine Core Systems Software Engineer - Native Foundation Software Engineer - Studio Modeling Software Engineer - Trust & Safety Software Engineer, Audio - C++ Software Engineer, Audio Machine Learning Software Engineer, DevOps Software Engineering Lead- International Growth Software Engineering Manager - Automation Platform Software Engineering Manager, Studio Modeling Sr ML Engineer : Recommendation, Ranking & Personalization Sr. Site Reliability Engineer for Storage Platform Sr. Software Engineer Sr. Software Engineer, Developer Monetization Studio Marketplace - Software Engineer (Fullstack) Technical Director, Developer Technical Director, Economy Technical Director, Social Technical Director, Universal Apps Technical Program Manager - Core Data Technical Program Manager - Global Data Infra Technical Program Manager - Global Developer Infrastructure Technical Program Manager - Observability Technical Program Manager - Social Platform Technical Program Manager - Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Test Tools and Infrastructure Engineer Tools Engineer UI Software Engineer, Studio RIDE And that's why Second Life is being Left Behind. Any questions?
  23. Rez zone sign. 1 LI without the Drivers sign, 2 LI with. No longer available, though; OPQ Garden Supplies is no more. That creator has left SL for Open Simulator. Mole Sign packs, at the MoleMart in Leafminer. Free, but prim-era. The Rez Zone sign is 6 LI. Each bolt is one prim.
  24. Oh, thanks. I haven't followed Open Simulator closely enough, and I really should. I just looked at the home page news.
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