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animats

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  1. A script in an avatar attachment can make all the usual Linden Scripting Language calls to move an object. Most of them work on avatars. You can override the built-in walk system that way. There are "wearable vehicles" which use this to give avatars vehicle-like behavior.
  2. Good idea. We've seen more repair activity by the moles lately, now that the giant housing developments of Bellessaria have mostly caught up with demand. A few key road connections have recently been built out, so you can get there from here.
  3. When you push a key that makes your avatar move, a message indicating a key press initiated move is sent to the server. When you press a key that makes your avatar turn, though, the avatar and camera turn in the viewer, and a message indicating the new facing direction is sent to the server. This is special for avatars; other moving objects are entirely server-controlled. The message is called an AgentUpdate and is sent over UDP. The server gets the AgentUpdate, and at the beginning of the next frame, computes the new position of the avatar. There's an attempt to move the avatar in the desired direction at a fixed speed for the avatar mode (walk, run, or fly). Collision detection and collision response is performed. For collision detection purposes, the avatar is a cylinder-like shape (a bit broader at the midsection, which is not well known). Arm and leg positions and attachments are ignored for collision purposes. Avatars are semi-physical objects - you can push them around, but can't knock them down. Unlike vehicles, which can pitch, roll, and yaw, as well as move and turn at variable speeds. This is to make avatars controllable with arrow keys. If you want full motion control, you need full body tracking like VRchat has. All viewers looking at the area where the avatar is get an update message, called an ImprovedTerseObjectUpdate, which gives the object's new position and orientation. This has both position and velocity information, and the viewer moves the avatar accordingly. ImprovedTerseObjectUpdate messsages are sent only when some movement happens, and for movement in a straight line, only once every 1 or 2 seconds. When there's a sudden change in direction or speed, the viewer, which is always a little behind, has to correct the prediction it made, which can result in rubber-banding and some other undesirable effects. This is seldom much of an issue at walking speed, but is a big issue for vehicles. That's roughly it.
  4. Possibly OK. But you need to read up on copyright law. Especially the difference between "derivative work" and "transformative use". Collage makers run into this problem all the time.
  5. Good. The sim servers are still running, then. Rezzing, inventory access, building, crossing region boundaries, and changing clothes all need communications with the database servers, so those things might not work and probably should be avoided until the systems are fully up.
  6. Many other sites are affected. DownDetector has a status page. It's not just SL. This AWS failure is taking down hundreds of web services.
  7. Amazon Web Services is having a network outage at the US-WEST-2 data center in Oregon, which is where Second Life lives. AWS status.
  8. Rez and Ride Donuts, Robin Loop Drivers of SL, Linden Road community, a small YavaPod station, a donut shop, a map of Robin Loop, and a big parking lot and rez zone. Robin Loop in Heterocera is one of my favorite places to ride. It's 13 regions around the loop, with varied scenery, and a good place to practice driving. Recently, there have been some improvements. There are mole-placed rez zone signs in more places. There's a long-standing Japanese community westward from Neumogen through Grote. A new museum has been added there, with classic works of art, some in 3D, and appropriate signs. There's a new combi (convenience store) with a rez zone, and a small Japanese suburb. There are now two GTFO hubs on the loop. There are several vehicle makers, most with demo rezzers, who have been there for years. There's a new cat-oriented roadside attraction. Roadside structures tend to be public, with private homes behind them. This is mainland, working properly as a community.
  9. Decentraland is far more centralized than they admit. The servers are centralized, the servers and clients are closed source, you can't run your own server or client, and management reserves the right to kick you off. Nobody actually goes there much. They have about 200-300 concurrent users. (You can see their server stats here. 218 users connected right now.) As for their NFT art, it's unimpressive. The combination of Fear of Missing Out and NFTs as a vehicle for money-laundering is driving the NFT market. Also, many of the trades and are fake, made between cooperating parties to push the posted price up. The widely-publicized Beeple deal is widely considered to be one of those. But that's another discussion. It's technically possible to build an NFT system as an SL user to move non-copy objects between grids, for objects set up for that by their creators. The effort to set all that up probably exceeds the revenue potential. An SL island of NFT galleries is quite possible. If you got enough "crypto influencers" to promote this (crypto influencer endorsements sell for about US$30,000 to US$40,000) you might be able to find enough suckers to make it profitable. Interest by existing SL users is likely to be very low, although some creators might go for it. Especially ones who had a gacha business with their own stuff and need a new market. Then we could all go to the galleries, admire, criticize, have gallery openings, wine and cheese, etc. SL has better artists than Decentraland does, and good NFT art would look better in SL surroundings than it does in Decentraland. As usual, the main headache is that new user onboarding to SL is so hard.
  10. Yes. We can see their priorities by looking at the Linden Lab job openings. 7 jobs with Tilia, 2 customer support people for SL. I do not understand management's fascination with Tilia. It's been around for three years, and it has no real customers other than Second Life. Tilia's non-SL customers are Sansar, which has maybe 25 concurrent users, and Upland, which only pays out money to a few users in the "closed beta for fiat out". There was a dream that Tilia was going to be able to siphon off a few percent of in-game transactions for major game companies. "Tilia Pay enables publishers of video games and virtual worlds to create in-world economies and monetize user interaction" - Tilia web site. Didn't happen. Tilia is another money drain, like Sansar, sucking the lifeblood out of Second Life. You don't need a financial-services subsidiary to accept credit cards. Anybody can do that. Neither Roblox nor Epic seems to find it necessary to have a financial services subsidiary to handle their accounts payable. Tilia solves a problem that no one seems to have. Meanwhile, as Luca points out, multi-billion dollar companies with substantial technical competence are aiming directly at SL's market niche. They have very different ideas about how a virtual world should be run. We can see the future of SL by watching the job listings and new Lindens for the next month or two. If serious SL tech jobs appear, then Mojo Linden has enough clout to try to get SL out of neutral. If not, he's not going to be effective, and SL is going nowhere.
  11. SL already has something comparable to NFTs - no-copy objects. There's a market in unique objects and "rares". If you really wanted to use a blockchain-based NFT system with Second Life, you could do it. A script in the object would make an HTTP call to a blockchain node to check if you owned the object and it was the only instance of that object. If the check fails for a few times in succession, the object deletes itself. Check on rez and once a day. A nice feature is that a re-delivery terminal for no copy items is possible. You could request re-delivery and get a lost object back. If you managed to get two copies in-world, one would delete itself after a while. This could be made to work cross-grid, so that you could delete an object on one grid (say SL) and get it re-delivered on some Open Simulator grid.Any grid with tamper-resistant LSL scripts could be allowed to participate. This requires coding some LSL programs and some smart contracts, and some web servers. If done right, ownership validation should continue to work as long as the blockchain involved continues to run. To the end user, it would look like an in-world vendor system. No Linden Lab cooperation is required. This is do-able technically. Interesting project for someone into NFTs. Probably not a moneymaker, but worth doing for the PR value. Make YouTube videos of nice-looking NFTs rezzed in SL. They'd look better than 90% of the NFTs out there.
  12. This has been discussed before. There have been a few proposals. Apply the Bellessaria rules on orbs and skyboxes to a few urban parts of mainland. Bay City, and maybe Kama City (the part of Zindra that has traffic lights). Those areas already have some special restrictions. Prohibiting skyboxes below 1000m would be a good move. Low-altitude skyboxes can blight sims for hundreds of meters around. Have an enforcement bot that, if it finds the same object two weeks in a row at a prohibited altitude, sends warning messages. At four weeks, it returns the objects.
  13. That's a useful comment. Can you say more? There seem to be people working on that, but not in SL. Philip Rosedale's "High Fidelity" is now about audio, and they're trying to make group audio work better. Presentation video systems have improved. Early approaches from universities showed the backs of people writing on blackboards. Today we tend to have a small picture of the user's face plus a big picture of the presentation. Here's that being done in VRchat. That's a nice effect. Being able to do Zoom calls in and out of Second Life would be useful. We need better display boards in SL. Text is far too hard to set up. Media on a Prim is too clunky. None of this is rocket science. SL should have had this fixed back in 2009, when "SL for Enterprise" was going to be a thing.
  14. Horizons architecture is all about the exteriors. Futuristic houses are hard. No. The "UFO house" on the right was a mass-produced product, and I've seen one in Marin County, CA. NO! Frank Gehry did stuff like this in the 1990s. This is by an imitator. This is the house for the big boss in some crime sim. Good firing slits. This could work. It was built in 2014, in Iceland. Nice interiors. It's not a houseboat, it just looks like one. This would fit well into a houseboat area. Tony Stark lived here? This is a concept drawing; nobody actually built this thing. It would work better in SL than RL. Note total lack of guardrails. Insta-Dome homeless shelters. Only $50L/week? None of these would make a good suburb. Futuristic suburbs are hard. Striking one-off houses are possible, but several hundred of them would not look good.
  15. I've never been able to figure out why breedables use so much sim resources. I have very active mobile NPCs that use less resources than breedables that mostly just stand around.
  16. Or a combination of the two. Take a look at some modern Japanese homes. They're nice looking, livable, and can be modeled without excessive land impact because they're mostly straight edges.
  17. Oh, I'll have to see that. I did the Drivers of SL drive through there, and the drive directions said use an "amphibious vehicle" for that section. Driving around the fantasy regions in a Larsson Logistics Hydro-Hauler, a heavy-duty amphibious truck, just felt wrong.
  18. I was just flying over Bellessaria, and the cloud movement as you go from one environment to another is disorienting. That zippy cloud movement when changing environments needs to go. However, the storm outside the fantasy continent is great!
  19. Probably more like the Hyperreality video. I've linked that before. It's more relevant now, because it seems to be Zuckerberg's vision - an overlay on the real world with Facebook-type info. That's where Google Glass, the Microsoft Hololens, and the other see-through headgear people may be headed. That's not the space SL is in, though. That's Augmented Reality, an overlay on the real world. Not another world such as SL. We're seeing more commentary on that in the New Yorker and similar intelligentsia-oriented publications. The same criticism has historically been aimed at books, movies, TV, the Internet, and smartphones - that people would detach from the real world in favor of involvement with some imaginary world. We do see that. People walking around looking at smartphones for a significant portion of their waking hours. That line leads to the AR/Hyperreality future. That problem is more on the passive entertainment side, though. "The great thing about television is that it's so passive" - Ted Turner (founder of TNT, CNN, etc.) Immersive virtual worlds and games require more engagement. That particular problem is less relevant to SL. It comes up a lot in fiction, because, in fiction, you can have "full dive" technology, where you really do feel that you're in the world. Nobody knows how to do that for real yet. Wearing a VR headset with tracking might eventually get close, but so far, wearing VR headgear is something people only do for short periods. Play Beat Saber for half an hour, fine. Spend 8 hours a day in VR at work, no.
  20. There are various whiteboards on Marketplace. Not great, given the limitations of displaying text in SL, but sort of OK.
  21. If you go to New Babbage, Babbage Palisades region, there is a shop called Graves Investigations, next to the Sphinx Club. In that shop, there are bookshelves and cases of curiosities. They're worth a very close look. Someone went to a lot of trouble. This is SL at its best.
  22. Market Map of the Metaverse. Linden Lab, where are you? By the same author is this article, "The Experiences of the Metaverse". This focuses on what do you do in the Metaverse. Second Life can do all that. Yet SL isn't even seen as being in the game.
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