animats
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Posts posted by animats
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On 7/25/2021 at 9:09 PM, Coffee Pancake said:
A region loading object physics for items placed along a neighboring region borders would resolve the border crossing 'drop' effect that's seen on all Horizons roads, so would reworking and replacing the roads so prims didn't end exactly at the region border. I reported this, some came out and walked up and down .. and then that was the end of that .. probably got filed away under "expected behavior".
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.
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"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.
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5 hours ago, Falconpart said:
unable to create an avatar or enter my premium home incomprehensible
"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.
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36 minutes ago, Artorius Constantine said:
It's that time of year!
Not yet! We're not past Back To School season yet.
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2 hours ago, MasoDevotina said:
It actually wouldn't matter whether it's parcel light or region, it is the same in this specific case. It would kinda ruin the whole work put into light and environment when you can't remind visitors to change to shared environment.
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.
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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.
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23 hours ago, Altier Verwood said:
llResetOtherScript("bullet_"+(string)slave);
llResetOtherScript("m_f");Resetting a script is a high-overhead operation. Best not to do that as part of a routine loop.
1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:Ray casts are throttled by the amount of time actually taken to perform the cast.
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.
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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.
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6 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:
@Sid Nagy said it best pages ago ... (sex) essential if you want adults on a platform. Major companies want nothing at all to do with these. Like the plague.
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.
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24 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:
So texting but no actual talking? Alrighty
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.
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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.
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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.
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9 minutes ago, Adeon Writer said:
Didn’t a big investment company recently buy SL? I would not expect them to sell it. They clearly have plans.
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.
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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.
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8 minutes ago, Mr Amore said:
Acquiring a LL home on Bellisseria is like playing the gacha too:
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.
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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.
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(Deleted, someone else answered better.)
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4 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:
All the nice things and became the true metaverse.
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.
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10 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:
With how entrenched and prominent avatar purchasing/assembly/customization is essential to the flow of money in SL, I doubt they will alienate the creator base allowing such a service, especially if said service offered a wide range of A to AAA game quality characters with ultra low complexity, a wide assortment of clothing and accessory options. It sounds lucrative only for games that already lack decent/appealing/competitive character creation/customization.
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.
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8 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:
You think owners of MMOs want a third party networked app that allows people to see other people wearing avatars on their platforms that aren't assets from those platforms, ie, out of their control/governance?
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.
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2 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:
Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen in some form over some edge case.
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.
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12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:
For example - There was at one time an attempt to go over a parcels Li allocation being putting objects metadata on a 3rd party external server that would require a special viewer. Users of regular viewers would see an incomplete build or nothing at all.
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.
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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.
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9 hours ago, Mr Amore said:
Where can we go without live action combat and all its ills?
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.
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Future of the metaverse, and all that
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
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.
It's early days. I'm encouraged to see the progress on graphics standards.