animats

No, it's the old bling.

You'll probably have to do it the other way round. Set it up so that whatever triggers the object rising also triggers the animation. Animations in SL happen in the viewer. The server (which is where scripts run) just tells the viewer "run this animation file", but the server has no idea what the animation does. This has many implications. Animations have no effect on collisions. They can't cause anything to happen that the server sees as an event. So they can't trigger much of anything. You can't even tell when they're done, except by keeping track of when they started and how long they run. There are restaurants in SL which do what you want to do. One of the better ones is the Brunel Hotel in New Babbage. Go have dinner there.

There's the Confederation of Democratic Simulators. It's six regions run by officials elected every six months by the landowners. They've been quietly doing this for 17 years now. Visit Neufreistadt and start at the town square.

I appreciate SL's ethos, which does come from its early years of hope. The hands-off, we're just the municipal government attitude does help. I want SL's traditions to play a strong role in defining how the metaverse looks. Otherwise, we get something awful like Zuckerberg's AR goggles with ad overlays on everything, or totally censored and monitored life from the Roblox people. I listened to the SIGGRAPH "Metaverse" panel today. Mostly people talking about plans, not actuals. Anyone can watch for free in a month. It cost $50 to watch it live. Lots of interest in graphic object standards from NVidia and Kronos. They like Pixar's USD content format, which is a superset of glTF. Roblox has big plans. 5 years to the metaverse. NPCs with AI, 10,000 avatars in a space, automatic voice language translation, 100ms automatic censorship for saying bad words. (Roblox is very kid-oriented and has a huge army of moderators.) Epic just sent some guy from Quixel, which is scanning everything in sight, like Google Earth at super high rez. Nobody from Facebook. Nobody from the NFT crowd. It's early days. I'm encouraged to see the progress on graphics standards.

Yes, the joints between road parts in Horizons and Zindra were totally botched. There are a few bad spots on other continents, but not many. There's also a problem with Bellessaria road corners not being level, which is a problem for some vehicles. LL needs a search and replace tool for semi-automatically fixing such problems. It would be cool if that was done in world by LDPW maintenance vehicles, slowly traversing the roads, examining road prims, looking up which UUIDs had an improved replacement available, lifting out the old prim, putting in the new prim, and continuing on. Like this one: SL needs something like this.

"Building the Open Metaverse", a SIGGRAPH panel, is tomorrow. Remote only. Tuesday, August 10, 1-3:00 pm ET. Not free, but "basic" SIGGRAPH registration ($50) is enough. Epic, NVidia, Roblox, Kronos, Unity - the people making it happen. Nobody from Linden Lab, though. Too bad. They should be presenting.

"Falconpart": "Age 8 years 4 months"? Is that you? Puzzled. There are lots of resources for new users. Firestorm Help Island usually has someone on duty. If you paid for premium membership, there's live support during working hours for the western USA.

Not yet! We're not past Back To School season yet.

I think you can do this. llReplaceAgentEnvironment( key agent_id, float transition, string environment ); "environment" can be the asset ID (that is, the UUID) of an environment. Since it's your environment, you can find that, and then, as part of a land-scope experience, set the environment for everyone entering. But test this out. It's not clear how it works vs parcel settings, region settings, moving to a new parcel in the same region, and such.

Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist partly responsible for this round of hype, has written "The Metaverse Primer". This is a 9-part series on what this is all about, where it might be going, the technologies involved, the business issues, and things business people need to know. It's a reasonably balanced overview, without excessive hype. Recommended reading for management-level Lindens. Second Life is not mentioned much, but there are some important points made about it. The most obvious behavioral change of the past year has been the increasing amount of time we spent online and in virtual worlds. But more important is destigmatization of this time. For decades, “gamers” have been making “fake” avatars and spending their free time in digital worlds while carrying out miscellaneous tasks and pursuing non-game-like objectives such as designing a room in Second Life (versus killing a terrorist in Counter-Strike). A huge portion of society, if not the majority of it, considered such efforts to be weird or wasteful or anti-social (if they didn’t look down on it outright). Some saw it as the modern version of an adult man building a train set in their basement. It’s hard to imagine what could have more rapidly changed this perception than COVID-19. Millions of the above skeptics have now participated in (and enjoyed) virtual worlds and activities such as Animal Crossing, Fortnite, or Roblox as they sought out things to do, attended events once planned for the real world, or tried to spend time with their kids indoors. Not only has this destigmatized virtual life, and “the Metaverse,” but it might even mean an extra generation will participate in it. That minor remark deserves attention by LL marketing. Ball's article "Payments, Payment Rails, and Blockchains, and The Metaverse" covers how creators get paid, and how much. There's a long discussion of ACH vs FedWire vs cryptocurrencies, and a useful list of how big a cut different virtual worlds take. The 30% "Apple Tax" is discussed and viewed very negatively. It gets worse. "Roblox pays developers only 24.5% of every dollar spent on their games, assets, or items." Ouch. Ball presents the argument that charging more than about 5%, about what most payment systems cost, chokes off the creator business as a business and has people looking for another payment approach. Companies will not pay a 30% markup for mere access to a platform. Apple is, of course, in litigation over this and undergoing antitrust investigation. There's even an article on lag: "Networking and the Metaverse". Worth a read by developers.

Resetting a script is a high-overhead operation. Best not to do that as part of a routine loop. There's considerable ray cast capacity. If you're not getting the error status, that's not the problem. You do have to check the error status, wait, and retry. I do many LLRayCast calls in my NPCs as they navigate their environment, and it works quite well if you do things reasonably. You should be able to get a shooter to work in SL, although it may be a bit sluggish by FPS standards.

The Experience system can sort of do that. There's llSetAgentEnvironment and llReplaceAgentEnvironment. But neither seems to allow just setting the environment to the parcel environment.

Maybe not. "In fact, Second Life is so successful at this aspect of the business that it makes it almost impossible for any other adult virtual world to get a financial foothold." - Ryan Shultz, metaverse blogger, 2019. SL has sufficient protections that you can't enter an adult area unless you want to. Of course, most of the people who get upset about this stuff are worried that someone else will see it. "A Puritan is someone who lives in fear that someone, somewhere is having fun." The only barrier to accessing Pornhub is a popup that asks if you're over 18. The UK enacted a law requiring age verification for porn sites a few years ago, and cancelled the plan in 2019. It looks like the regulatory problem belongs to the past. Suppressing sex is very expensive. Roblox has a huge number of moderators. Read their SEC S-1 filing. It's a big fraction of their labor costs. Because their average user age is 13, they have to overdo it. They want to get an older demographic. That's where SL comes in, as the product you graduate to after outgrowing Roblox. Facebook Horizon was determined to prevent sex. So all their avatars have nothing below the waist and float in midair. Facebook Horizon was a flop. So there's a business case for doing this the SL way - have adult areas, make sure no one gets there who doesn't want to, and don't worry about it too much.

The in-viewer browser isn't allowed microphone or camera access, so you can't do voice calls. It would be neat, and useful, if you could make Zoom calls from in-world.

All the Norphone system really does is send text messages as IMs. But it's very flexible. They have all the phone features. You can forward calls, have answering machines, have phones ring at multiple points, and so forth. A Gentek Telecom central office in-world. This looks like a Nortel DMS-100 from maybe 1990, if you're into telephone central office equipment. The whole Gentek system is modeled after AT&T equipment from 1980s-1990. There are two of those central offices that I know of. There are microwave relay towers in-world. There's a phone store. There's a network operations center. There are repair trucks. There's a corporate headquarters skyscraper. All beautifully detailed. Gentek Telecom network operations center. Today, the lights are out and the big consoles are gone. Once, they were staffed. They were very thorough about this. It's one of those in-world things, like Shergood helicopters, which are far better than they need to be.

A "plain mesh panel"? If it's just a scaled cube, use a prim. A good lowest level of detail for a mostly flat object is a mesh cube, 12 triangles, one face texture.

I suspect that Waterfield (the company), which has bought and sold various small banks and financial service companies, bought Linden Lab in hopes Tilia was going to be a significant player in the next generation of financial services. That did not happen. If we could get Roblox to buy Second Life from Linden Lab, that might be a step forward. Waterfield would still have Tilia, and could pursue their fintech dream. Roblox says they are going to build the metaverse, and they have a pretty good track record in building big virtual worlds and getting people to use them. Their user base has been increasing by 20-30% per year for a decade, and they're now at the 1.8 million concurrent user level. I met the Roblox CEO back when he had a tiny physics engine startup in San Francisco in an alley off 8th St near Folsom. He's a physicist by training. I used their early physics engine for some early legged locomotion R&D, and they used my work as a demo. They made good software. That was a long time ago, and I doubt he remembers me. I remember him as being basically sensible. https://corp.roblox.com/technology/ It's like hearing the dreams from the early days of SL. From people who made it work at 20x bigger than SL ever got.

For a while, there was a thing for realistic modern roleplay in SL. NTBI, the parent of Gentek Telecom, has all the props for that. Someone could have an auto accident, and the vehicles would stop working. They'd find a phone, and call 911. The dispatcher would contact roleplay groups to send police cars, fire trucks, and a tow truck. All the roleplay groups would handle the incident, and the car would be put on a flatbed and taken to a garage for repair. Much of this comes from the SL era before teleporting became easy.

Because you can't resell a house on Bellessaria, it's not considered "gambling" in jurisdictions that regulate loot boxes. It's the "cashing out" feature of SL that makes gachas gambling.

Aw. It's too bad that system never really caught on. Apparently it was used more around 2009 or so. There's a lot behind it. There's a whole range of Norphones for home and office, with all the standard phone features. There are in-world GenTek Telecom central office buildings for the phone system in Hyperion and SYZM. There were once operator positions, where avatars answered 911 and operator calls from special consoles and referred them to in-world roleplay police, fire, and coast guard units. There are phone booths. These actually work. Outgoing calls only.

(Deleted, someone else answered better.)

Oh, I wish, I wish. But LL has neither the money nor the technical competence to pull that off. Unless, say, they get acquired by Roblox or Epic.

I agree, where SL is concerned. Although I might use this tool to make some new low-poly animesh NPCs. I'm always looking for human background characters with full perms and proper LODs.

They sell this service to MMOs. "Don't spend months building a character system. Integrate Ready Player Me in less than a day and focus on the core experience of your product." It's not done without support from the MMO. These are showing up in games and virtual worlds that don't come from the biggest studios. I'm bringing this up in the context of being able to visit across worlds. "Metaverse" proponents talk about that a lot. Someone saying "Hey, let's go visit this new club in Second Life" in VRchat could get more people into SL.

Why? It's a hosted tool. You can use the web-based avatar creator without signing up or using their service. What you get are rather generic avatars, but it does work. You get out a .glb file, which Blender can import. Newly created Ready Player Me avatar imported into Blender. 14,320 triangles. That their avatars are not photorealistic is a deliberate choice. They tried photorealistic avatars, and people didn't like it. They have a useful paper on this. They're about at the Fortnite level of realism. Facebook Horizons is more abstract; SL and most AAA titles are more photorealistic. It shouldn't be all that hard to translate these avatars into SL avatars. Somebody into Blender rigging could probably write a Python script to rename all the bones and adjust rotations where necessary. I'm not suggesting these should replace SL avatars, but it could be a nice way to get users from other systems, including VRchat, to visit SL.