animats

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.

Have you seen "Ready Player Me"? This is a system used in some low-end virtual worlds. It outsources the entire avatar and clothing system to a third party. All avatar customization is done on the Ready Player Me site, the assets reside at Ready Player Me, and the game/virtual world uses a Ready Player Me library to render the avatar. So your avatar is portable across games/virtual worlds. It's free for a game to use this, because avatar clothing costs money and that's paid to Ready Player Me. Because this is all they do, they're getting good at this, especially on the ease of use front.

CasperVend has customer service and responds to inquiries. They have an elaborate system to make their vendors fail-safe - multiple servers, plus info storage within the vendor so if the servers are down, the transaction info is not lost and is recovered when the servers come back up. SL Marketplace, not so much. We need third-party vendors to compete with LL. Otherwise they'll start thinking they get to set prices.

As a social space, SL needs to work better. The ongoing troubles with group messages are, well, embarrassing. More than that, social activities should just flow. No "Oh, I have to relog". No "I turned into a jellydoll". No "My outfit won't load". No "I came off at the region crossing and now I can't move." All of which happened to me yesterday when I was showing someone some of my favorite spots. If you try to do anything as a group in the big world, something will break. That is no longer acceptable. If you ship a game with bugs like that today, you are laughed and reviewed into a recall. That just happened to "Cyberpunk 2077". Reviews were terrible.The product was pulled from sale, went back into development for six months, and came out in reasonable working order. That's what the market expects today.

The Drivers of SL HUDs get past that. Their NPCs are partially driven by a HUD you wear, so you get a personalized experience. It can be done, and it should be easier to do. These forums should have a "game dev" group, where people interested in doing that can talk. Yes. This is especially bad if you're far from the Western US, where the servers are. Europe is about 200ms away, round trip. However, SL is laggier than speed of light lag requires. This deserves more discussion, but not in this topic. Shooter games use tricks to create the illusion of less lag for targeting purposes. There's a lot of special casing around bullets. SL has no built-in notion of "bullet". Bolting that on is probably not that great an idea. It adds constraints around other things. I've struggled with that, with my NPCs, Keyframe motion has some problems. The motion you ask for is only approximately what you get, especially under load. Although my NPCs move about as well as avatars. I'm looking forward to seeing who LL gets as new CTO and CEO. That will tell us if there will be forward progress. Or not.

SL does. That's what the Linden-run social islands are for. What I'm getting at is that they don't work very well socially. I'm not sure why. From the system side, the key is making it so that the most annoying person does not dominate the space. Better spatial audio might help. Check out High Fidelity's new spatial audio system, which is what Rosedale is doing now. He's trying to make crowded rooms with everybody talking at once work. Breakroom uses that system. SL already has spatial audio with Vivox, although I think it's just volume, not stereo direction. It might be helpful to exaggerate some audio distance effects to get better social spaces. Suppose there are 5 people in a room, and one of them is yelling a lot. If the other four get closer together, and further from the yeller, the yeller should not just fade out. They should fade out more than distance alone indicates. This is a really hard problem, but if gotten right, meetings and parties in SL would work much better. This has to be totally automatic. Additional buttons are not the answer.

Here's the real problem: "VRChat is a social platform at its core. You have a virtual body in a virtual space, but you're encouraged to meet new people and hang out with your friends here. You can talk through a microphone, and hear your friends through your computer's speaker, or a headset. ... Not long after logging into a public server, you'll quickly encounter any number of other players — to you, though, they'll look like anime girls, superheroes, Star Wars characters ..." SL is not that good as a social space. You can have the above experience in Second Life. Just go to Social Island 10. It's awful. Something is fundamentally wrong with group conversational interaction in SL. Discuss. (Search for "meeting in VRchat" to see what it's like over there. It's much more lively.)

Roblox has more adult users than SL does. (It's in their S-1 filing with the SEC.)

That's worth some serious thought. More later.

Exactly. The Fantasy Faire video is B-O-R-I-N-G. It starts out with 2 1/2 minutes of a slow scrolling transcript of paragraph roleplay. Then there's a slow flythrough of a steampunk medieval build. At 5 FPS. At, for some reason, second floor level. But there's no sense of what you do there. Other than admire the architecture. The builder really likes flying buttresses, even where they don't belong. Here's a more fun SL video, from Luca Grabacr.

It's a good idea, but the cost of doing that is high. None of the big-name players, like NVidia and Google, seem to support SL. Because LL would have to make a deal with them. There are several services where you rent a remote gamer PC by the hour and can upload your own software, so you can install a SL viewer yourself. There are several services like that. Paperspace, LoudCloud, Shadow, etc. Cost varies, but seems to be around $1/hr. If you use one, create a throwaway alt with a unique password. Best not to trust those services too much. This is not a good way to onboard new users. You get to start with an empty virtual machine and configure it. But it's something experienced users might want to have available. If LL did a deal with NVidia or Stadia, so the LL viewer was available from the "load game" menu, this would be a viable option.

LL has done a good job of filling in some of the more important voids. I'd like to see a few more spots filled in, but not all that many. More navigable water on the south side of Sansara would be nice. The unfinished section on the east edge of Zindra, where the land ends with a raw edge, not even a proper shore, needs work. But we're way ahead of where we were a year ago. You can go all the way from Satori to Sansara via Bellessaria, and I've made that trip twice, once in a plane and once in a boat.