animats

Mainland lighting is about to get fixed. Ambient light level was set too low when EEP went in, and there was no tool to change the defaults for sims for large numbers of sims. That's supposed to be fixed in the next server rollout. See the notes from last Tuesday's server user group meeting. SL lighting vs skin is a shader limitation. If you don't have enough specular color on skin, you get dull, dead skin. If you have enough to get past that, you can see a shiny dot where the sun reflects off skin. The combination of this problem and SL mainland's lack of enough ambient illumination puts some SL avatars into the "uncanny valley". The "uncanny valley" effect kicks in when pictures of humans get close enough to reality that they get evaluated as human, rather than "cartoon". Then humans become very critical of flaws. Hollywood hit the bottom of the uncanny valley with "The Polar Express" (2004), which is widely considered "creepy". Hollywood got out of that with more advanced rendering techniques. Now you can't tell who's real and who's CG. Games then got stuck in the Uncanny Valley as the visuals got better. That was a problem for a while. One solution is giving everyone somewhat dark, tanned skin, which you see in the GTA series. AAA titles started getting past this problem around 2019, whith better rendering techniques. The real way out of this is adding a subsurface scattering layer, which SL does not support. Maybe someday. Meanwhile, stay out of the sun and tone skins down a bit.

Yes. Yes. You have both a Linden dollar balance and a US dollar balance with LL, and you can see both when you're logged into the Second Life web site. The Linden dollar balance is for buying things in world, from the Second Life Marketplace or from vendors in world. Land is also usually sold for Linden dollars. Linden Lab's own membership charges and land charges ("tier") are in US dollars, and come from your "USD balance". If you don't have enough USD balance, your credit card is charged. You can buy Linden dollars with USD, or sell Linden dollars and get USD. Costs about 5% and the exchange rate is about L$250 = 1USD. But LL will not sell your Linden dollars to pay a USD charge. This is complicated because there are people doing business in Second Life, making money and withdrawing it. You can withdraw funds from your USD balance and get paid via PayPal, which has another 5% service charge. Here's the official policy. If you get into a past-due status with LL, getting things untangled is reportedly a major headache and involves lots of time on phone hold.

It's easy, but not obvious. Build->Select Build Tool->Land Tool->Select Land. Point and click on the land of interest. This selects a square on the land. It will work across ban lines but not sim boundaries. Click "About Land". This will bring up the parcel info.

Me either. However, if you don't like desert, getting out of Arizona is a good move.

Check out the Amazon River roleplay area, which does that via an experience. They force you to load an anti-cheat script.

I wasn't here for the telehub period, so I don't know what it was like back then. Double-click teleporting to avoid walking short distances may have made it too easy. I have that turned off. There are some things SL could do to make the sense of space in the world a bit more real. When teleporting, you should see something like what Google Earth and GTA V shows you. You get a view of the world map where you are, zoom out, pan over to where you're going, and zoom in again. (This also allows more time to load the assets for the new area, so more of the loading delay is hidden.) Parcels with privacy on ("Avatars on other parcels can see and chat with avatars on this parcel" unchecked) should not allow camming in. You have to go there. Right now, you can cam in, but can't see the avatars. On parcels with privacy on, you would not be allowed to sit or double-click teleport while camming. You have to walk there. This also means you can't "sit" through a wall, so locked doors offer some security. You can set the landing point for the parcel outside the house, so visitors appear at your front door, not inside. Smarten up camera control, so that the viewpoint is never on the other side of a wall from the avatar. Pull the viewpoint towards the avatar until there's no obstacle in between. Just sitting on a chair should never result in a viewpoint outside the wall. This reduces the need for camming.

That's worth bringing up at Server User Group on Tuesday at noon.

SL has a useful gesture system which isn't used much. The stock gestures are way overacted. Also, not bento. I have some bento gestures, but they, too, are overacted. I'd like to get a set of subtle conversational gestures - yes, no, smile, neutral, frown, bored, attentive, annoyed, angry - for general use during conversation. Anyone know of a good set?

Exactly. It's another small thing which gives SL an unnecessarily bad new user experience.

If someone did good gestures for Catwa heads, that would be a start. There are HUDs for facial expressions, but they're clunky, only useful for posing stills. Not for conversation. I've been looking at other virtual worlds, and most of the successful ones have lively looking groups in conversation. In comparison, SL looks dead.

Probably. What struck me about that is the fluidity and expressiveness of the avatar expressions. SL has gestures, but they suck. They're over-acted, don't have a useful emotional vocabulary, and are hard to use. This is a good project for someone with acting and machima experience. Come up with a good gesture set for Second Life conversation. The machinery is all there. You can define gestures and bind them to keys. You can make animations. Now make gestures usable. Give us, say, 9 gestures useful in conversation and bind them to the keyboard's number pad. Offer a gesture acting class, or make a video.

Cute Face Tutorial, for Zepeto in S. Korea. The better heads in SL can be customized like this, but not as easily.

There's a new Korean metaverse: Ifland. It's cartoony, but it's K-Pop grade cartoony. It's a follow-on to Zepeto, which was aimed directly at K-Pop fans. It's intended for mobile use. Both are from Korea Telecom. It's disjoint areas, not a seamless world like SL. Allows about 130 avatars per area, supposedly. You set your avatar's facial expressions by texting emoji.

The default AO should include basic swimming. I once came across two new 0-day users who were in a kayak in a canal in Bay City. No paddles. (Think about how much a new user needs to know to get paddles into their hands. And also, that in most games, not having a paddle might mean you couldn't move.) They were way overcontrolling and were stuck banging back and forth between the canal walls. One tried standing and sank to the bottom of the canal. They couldn't get out. I IMd them "Push PAGE UP". Then they flew up to the underside of a bridge. Eventually they got out. I hope they got past that.

Learn to embrace the pain.

I want three houses for Ventnor Avenue and a hotel on Marvin Gardens.

Gygax, Narnia, Rivendell, Westeros, The Shire, and Tolkien regions already exist.

Worse, the camera control for obstacles between camera and avatar is poor. If there's an obstacle between camera and avatar in that view, the camera should move forward towards a shoulder position until it has a clear view. You should never sit down and find your camera stuck behind a wall. This has been pretty much fixed in the game industry, and SL is way behind.

Windows S and Windows 365 Cloud PC aren't allowed to run Second Life. Windows S will only run "apps" from Microsoft's "app store". Windows 365 Cloud PC is Microsoft's answer to Google's Chromebook; it's mostly just a terminal to Microsoft's servers. Windows is becoming a walled garden. Microsoft's terms for their "app store" may be a problem. 10.8.1 If your product includes in-product purchase, subscriptions, virtual currency, billing functionality or captures financial information, the following requirements apply: ... All games (excluding games made available through a subscription in PC gaming subscription products ((products whose primary functionality is to enable access to a catalog of games via a subscription service) and in-app purchases in such games) and products offered on Xbox consoles are required to use the Microsoft Store in-product purchase APIs. So, either you pay through Steam or Microsoft. Microsoft takes 30%. 11.7 Your product must not contain or display content that a reasonable person would consider pornographic or sexually explicit. Might be a problem. 10.8.4 If your game offers “loot boxes” or other mechanisms that provide randomized virtual items, then you must disclose the odds of receiving each item to customers prior to purchase. These disclosures may appear: in-product, such as in an in-app store, on the Microsoft Store Product Description Page (PDP), and/or on a developer or publisher website, with a link from the Store Product Description Page (PDP) and/or in-app. That needs to be cleaned up in SL anyway. Here's an overview of loot box litigation. None of this applies for ordinary download-the-installer installs. But it's gradually becoming clear that Microsoft is migrating consumers to locked-down, approved apps only content. Something for LL to prepare for.

Tilia shouldn't need Transferwise or PayPal. Tilia is supposed to be a money transfer company. They should be able to transfer money. Tilia's connections to the banking system are very weak. They aren't connected to the major banking payment systems, ACH or SEPA or FedWire. They work through the second-tier players, such as PayPal and Skrill. They can't just deposit to your bank account via ACH. When you cash out Linden Dollars from SL, four layers take a cut. If SL paid out through ACH directly, there would only be two layers. Outbound ACH only costs about $0.25 per transaction if you're a business. Most major banks don't charge their customers for inbound ACH at all. Tilia's customer list is Second Life, Sansar, and Upland. Which is what it's been for the last year. Sansar is too tiny to matter. Upland doesn't really pay out money. Upland claims they do, but you have to be a privileged user to use that "beta feature", which has been "in beta" since last year. This is a classic red flag - can't get money out. Upland thus looks like a cryptocurrency scam/Ponzi scheme. Arguably, it's bad for Linden Lab's reputation to be associated with them. I'll bet Tilia will go away or be spun off when LL gets a new CEO.

This sort of thing looks bad. Legitimate financial companies do their Know Your Customer verification when you open the account, not when you want to withdraw. Unexpected difficulty with withdrawals makes one think of crooked cryptocurrency exchanges, crooked binary options brokers, bucket shop fake brokers, and Bernard Madoff. It's bad for Tilia's reputation in the financial services industry to do this. If they want to be taken seriously, this must stop. "If you're having trouble with a payment service, you can submit a complaint online or call us toll-free at (855) 411-2372." - U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Good point. If you move, you have to redecorate, and fill up a Bellessaria house with furniture. Remember, each Linden Home owner is a premium member. One who's not costing LL many resources. Annoying them is bad. I'd suggest continuing to offer the old Linden homes, but collect new move-ins in areas intended to remain busy. When a region is 1/4 rented, reduce its compute allocation to homestead level. Regions that have no tenants become open space, and the houses can be removed while retaining the landscaping. LL can probably get the operating cost for the Linden Home regions down substantially. Offer existing tenants a free move to an identical house in a busier area, if they want.

Please take a seat. One annoyance reported by new users is going into a room and finding it full of avatars doing nothing who won't talk to you. I previously suggested a way to avoid Linden safe hubs becoming cluttered with lost bots and AFKs. Just get them to sit down. If an avatar doesn't move or type for a long time, sit them in a seat. That's makes it clear they're waiting, not participating. It's harmless. So here's a demo, on one of my parcels. It's a simple experience script. Get within 20m of the bench, do nothing for 30 seconds, and you'll get an experience popup. If you allow it, it sits you on the bench. That's all. It won't eject an avatar. It's a light touch solution to the problem. This is most useful in places which already have an experience enabled, which Linden safe hubs do. At a hub, one would use a much longer timer, maybe an hour. 30 seconds is just for this proof of concept demo. Try the demo at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Vallone/175/16/36 and comment, please. (Removed the extra copies of the picture. The forum uploader was reporting errors on uploads and it took several tries.)

The underlying problem is that Second Life doesn't have a real hierarchy. In just about everything else in 3D editing and animation, child objects can have child objects of their own. Second Life doesn't have that. So sitting is a special purpose hack, attachments are a special purpose hack, and skeletons are a special purpose hack. Just getting the wheels on a vehicle to both steer and rotate requires workarounds. Philip Rosedale has said this was his biggest mistake when designing Second Life. (Interestingly, the server to viewer message protocol supports a full hierarchy, although the code in the LL and Firestorm viewer do not.)

OK. The actual formula is max(high_tri_count, med_tri_count * 2, low_tri_count * 4, lowest_tri_count * 8) / 666.66666