animats
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Posts posted by animats
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35 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:
Ping Sim 583 msecs
"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.
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8 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:
Yes. If they're short of that many people, how on earth are they managing to keep anything going?
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.
8 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:Being cynical, advertising that many positions doesn't mean they want to recruit that much staff, it might be a sign of ambition with the intention of attracting investment.
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.
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Bellessaria is upscale, and high elves are upscale. Gnomes and trolls are working class.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:
Well no, last update to trunk was today. Pay no mind to the latest stated stable as they are not updating that page much anymore. An alternative which many find better is here.
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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See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlHTTPRequest
Useful MIME types are:
- "text/html"
- "text/plain;charset=utf-8"
depending on whether the site returns HTML or raw plain text.
"application/x-www-form-urlencoded;" asks for a strange encoding used only for filling in old-style HTML web forms.
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1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:
If the SL platform is ubiquitous. We win.
There's already Open Simulator. Last update 2019.
Really good idea, but like all the federated social networks, failed to take off.
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Loner Lane in New Babbage might suit you.
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6 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:
I would (do, actually) agree with you, except the responses I kept hearing at the Server User Group meetings from the Lindens regarding such problems was "it's hard".
How to get over that mountain and find our way to happy-valley?
That is the job of the new VP of Engineering, Mojo Linden.
LL's developers are trying to maintain an engine with the complexity of Roblox or Unity or Unreal with a far smaller staff. They have all they can do keeping the system going. Roblox has several hundred developers, about fifty teams, and high ambitions. They have a "can't do" attitude because they are understaffed and overwhelmed.
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On 9/9/2021 at 1:16 AM, Sid Nagy said:
One example: The current avatar system is not 100% in LL's control because of all kinds of third party bodies, heads and other body parts, so moving forward in that field will be more difficult than for newly started competition.
Others will have put it on and it fits. We are doomed to fiddle lots and than lots again.On 9/9/2021 at 9:05 AM, Coffee Pancake said:I disagree that we can't win based on early design decisions. New content types are entirely possible and most old content will fit into any future system as a subset.
I'm with Coffee on this. I've been rather deep into the internals of the viewer, the network protocols, and the asset formats. Reusing existing assets in new ways is not impossible. I've been talking about that in another topic. I also have a more serious discussion going over on GameDev, to find out what's been done in that area. Making clothing Just Work, even with existing items, looks quite possible. Basic goal: if it fits in pose stand position, lower layers won't peek through in any other pose.
SL's value is in the user-created assets, the user base, and the society of the world. Without those, you have another Sansar. The point I keep making is that it is far, far easier to fix SL's technical problems than to acquire as many users as SL has. It would take more developers. It's not free, but it's possible.
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4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:
Agreed that anything that actually blocks Linden waterway should be reported, and you should make a point of following up to see if it's been resolved. If not, enlist some friends to add ARs.
Yes. I've ARd attempts to turn a public waterway into a private beach by adding off-parcel rocks.
Trying to boat through the narrow waterways of Sansara is really tough. If you have private water that adjoins Linden water, and insist on using ban lines or security orbs, please put out can buoys with the standard keep-out symbol.
Standard keep-out buoy, real-world version. This one is upstream of the water intakes at Hoover Dam, so it's there for a good reason.
SL versions are available on Marketplace, and I've seen them being used properly in world to mark keep-out areas.
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16 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:
Does your journey have any stops? How about loading up on waypoints while at the stop then zip through them from memory then do it again at the next stop.
My NPCs actually do that sort of thing, with coarse path planning, fine path planning, and path execution all in different scripts, running concurrently. They give the illusion of being real-time, but are really executing plans made a few seconds previous. If anything goes wrong, they stop, and stand, arms folded, while replanning takes place. All this is to be able to handle overloaded sims with 64K scripts. Huge headache to write and debug.
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17 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:
more efficient way of storing data?
Amazon Dynamo DB, perhaps. It's like KVP, but you can store all the data you can pay for, terabytes if necessary. The first 25GB is free. Someone who needs that should write LSL code to access AWS DynamoDB. It talks HTTP and JSON, so that's not too tough.
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I'd like to have the stack memory counted separately from code and heap. Large incoming messages, and some LSL calls, can briefly use up large amounts of stack and cause a stack-heap collision. Scripts don't get a chance to discard or reject or break up or process a big incoming message before it overflows memory. This makes some scripts unreliable. So I'd like to have 64K of code and data, plus up to 64K of stack. Stack memory is temporary; when you're waiting for an event, there's no stack space in active use, although space may be allocated.
As for larger scripts, that's a problem with technical debt. It recently slipped out at a user group meeting that the server processes are still in 32-bit mode, and thus sims can't use more than 4GB of memory. So there's a hard ceiling on sim memory. Understand, in the Linux world (the servers run Linux) that's rare. Just about everything that runs on Linux is 64-bit today. You have to download old libraries to even build 32-bit programs on LInux.
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14 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:
They are intentionally moving to broaden that demographic ahead of their user base. Their metaverse aspirations require that.
Yes. From the Roblox S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission:
• Platform Extension: We are continually investing in the Roblox Platform, including significant investments in high fidelity avatars, more realistic experiences, 3D spatial audio technology, and other social features. These investments should enable Roblox to support human co-experience in the entertainment, learning and business markets. For example, developers will be able to build and host virtual concerts, classrooms, meetings and conferences on Roblox.
• Age Demographic Expansion: As a result of platform extension, developers, and creators are now able to build higher quality experiences and content that appeals to an older age demographic. We believe there is significant potential for us to increase our penetration and engagement across all age demographics. We ultimately aim to be a brand that serves all ages. An early sign of what is possible: DAUs from our 17 to 24-year-old user age group grew faster than our core under 13 age group in the year ended December 31, 2020.
Roblox already has more users over 21 than SL does. Just because of their sheer size.
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13 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:
Given them another year and they will have us dead in the water.
It looks possible to add something like this to SL, on existing content. I've been discussing this over on GameDev.net. There, others with background in the math involved have commented. There are some hard problems to be solved, but they're not impossible.
I'm focusing here on the "peek through" problem. The goal is that when you put on an item, if it fits properly in the neutral pose (pose stand position) it will fit in all joint positions. The layers underneath would get compressed a bit, and vertices would be added to meshes, to make this work. No need for alpha layers. No mods required to existing items.
All this would be done by a "mesh baking server". It would be done at the same time BOM textures are baked, probably by the same server. All the meshes that make up a character go in, and new, slightly tweaked temporary meshes come out. Like BOM baked textures, they live for the duration of the login. If you change shape sliders, this rebake has to occur as you end edit mode.
How would this work? Informally, additional points would be added to mesh attachments and skins around tight spots. New points on the inner layer would be given rigging weights taken from the outer layer, so they move in sync with the outer layer and never poke through it. Exactly how to do that is a reasonably hard problem, and if you want to discuss it, please contribute to the discussion on GameDev.
Roblox is going further than this, with explicit "cage meshes" added by creators, but they don't have a huge inventory of existing mesh clothing to support, so their approach is a bit different.
The viewer mods required for this should be similar to those for Bakes On Mesh - fetch the data from a different URL for avatars. Server side, it's a big, but self-contained, program within the BOM server system.
There's also an avatar optimization opportunity during this bake. Since the baking system has both mesh and textures, it can do optimizations. For lower levels of detail, simplify the mesh, but use the normals from the high LOD, so fine detail doesn't entirely go away, it just goes into the normal map. The entire avatar (or, probably, the usual head/upper/lower parts) could be combined into single meshes, like a game character. Lower LODs could look good, which means avatars only have to go to high LOD when really close. This would speed up rendering in clubs and other crowded places.
Nice side benefit: for the first time, something server-side knows about the visual geometry of avatars. So there could be an LSL data server request for useful info like character height, pelvis to seat distance, pelvis to back distance, etc., so sit scripts could adjust the position for character dimensions. Built-in sit could do that, too.
Now, ordinarily this would be a tough sell to LL management. But this time it's different. Management level summary: The competitor with a $50 billion market cap is about to surpass SL in character quality, which was SL's edge. Time to do something or get trampled.
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27 minutes ago, ValentineAerros said:
I logged in today and decided to go shopping only to find I was unable to visit the sim (Lelutka Mainstore).
I went to try on demos once before and had no issues. I figured this was a simple issue that would be soon resolved, but quickly found I couldn't message in any of my groups, teleport to any sims, anything. I kept getting the following error messages: "Unable to send your message in (Insert group name). Error making request, please try again later.", and: "Teleport failed...There was a big system outage today. See the system status page.
Second Life is a large, distributed system, and it's very common for individual parts to fail without the entire grid going down. Because the individual region servers are somewhat independent, many failures allow you to continue using a region even though some inter-region service has failed.
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3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:
in a virtual world that reward is SOCIAL INTERACTION.
Yes.
Now that provides a focus for engineering effort. Especially because most of the new virtual worlds are doing better at social, even though they can't do the big-world thing or the user-creation thing as well.
It's pretty clear what needs to be fixed for social to work. Everything on this list has been discussed to death.
- The group messaging system breaks down for large groups. Fix.
- Voice chat. The other leading 3D social worlds are going to better voice chat with smart spatial audio. VIVOX has trouble staying connected.
- Text chat which works and looks more like Facebook/Twitter/Instagram. SL predates the industry conventions for this.
- Voice to text, text to voice, and machine translation.
- Camera control that never leaves you looking at the back of a chair or wall.
- Facial expressions that follow voice, and maybe head tracking, so YouTubers and influencers can make good videos that aren't b-o-r-i-n-g.
- Figure out some way to avoid the "group standing in a circle not moving or talking" cliche. Huge turn-off to new users. Makes SL look dead.
- Groups should be able to travel together through the world without people being Left Behind at region crossings. Travel for one person mostly works for an hour at a time, but groups on a boat will come unglued within minutes.
- All this needs to Just Work without fooling with top-bar menus.
How to convince management of this? Standard user interface testing. You pay non-SL users to spend a few hours logging into SL, going through the tutorial, and then doing a few simple social tasks. Go to a club and talk to somebody. Go dancing. Go to a short talk on something and ask a question. Go shopping with someone, buy a clothing item, and wear it. Take a short road or boat trip with somebody. While they're doing this, take video of both the user and the screen. Then, someone goes through the videos (good psych intern job) and notes the points where someone failed at a task, got frustrated, got angry, or gave up. Make up a highlights reel. Show it to management and devs. Optionally, do the same thing for some of the competition and compare.
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Roblox is implementing mesh avatars.
Roblox improved avatars, phase 1.
Their "cage mesh" system is interesting They have a way to make mesh clothing layer properly, without "alphas". The "cage" around the clothing mesh can compress the layers below slightly. No more lower layers peeking through.
Users can upload meshes and use all these features. This is currently in live beta test.
When they finish this round of improvements, their avatar system will be ahead of SLs.
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Mandatory XKCD.
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44 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:
So .. WHY isn't there a published roadmap for SL going forward?
Whenever LL management has had a big plan in recent years, it resulted in a business failure and sizable losses. Sansar. Blocksworld. Tilia. With that history, grand plans coming down from top management are to be feared. Incremental improvements are safer.
We're seeing more entrants with mediocre virtual worlds. You can now bash together a virtual world now without too much new code, using components from Oculus for VR, Unity for content creation, Ready Player Me for avatars, Sketchfab for a content library, Crucible for authentication and payments, and some hosting service for the data center. The result will be mediocre, but you can be online in months, not years. Some such world might take off because people found it entertaining. Many of the new entrants are hoping that fandom, branding, or Make Money Fast will make their world take off. So far, there are no huge successes in that space. But someone might have a hit. It's worth paying attention to what others are doing.
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6 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:
but the fuzzy part is how long you have to wait.
That's bad form. Financial services which drag their feet on payouts raise red flags. California money transfer time limits may apply. It's not at Tilia's sole discretion. Tilia is in a regulated business.
6 hours ago, Finite said:and the availability of any refund will be subject to the relevant Platform TOS and the determination of the relevant Provider.
This probably reflects what Upland is doing. It's very hard to get real money out of Upland You have to be in the "fiat out beta" group, which has been "beta" for a year or so now. (Whether Upland is a Ponzi scheme is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
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I can't be the only one who believe SL's Second Rising is not impossible, what do you think? - Strategic Overview
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
There's a lot of anger here. Some of it justified, some not.
Let's review the big issues.
Non-problems:
Those are excuses, not real problems.
That summarizes the big issues. Comments?