animats
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Posts posted by animats
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On 6/29/2021 at 10:19 PM, ChinRey said:
The default rear view is a poor compromise between a modern closer variant and a birdseye view,
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On 7/8/2021 at 8:48 PM, Sparkle Bunny said:
Other reasons for hanging on to an old Linden home: you only have 512 tier to spare and would rather not live in a camper; you hate gardens; you're addicted to banlines; all your furniture is pre-mesh poseball stuff and you don't want to be mocked by the neighbours...
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.
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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.)
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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.)
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Just now, Lucia Nightfire said:
Stop saying that. 🤐
You know it's charged triangle based. So anything over the 1:2, 1:4, 1:8, Medium, Low, Lowest LOD triangle ratio gets added as well. There is sadly a lot of content with Medium and even Low LOD triangle counts matching High LOD triangle count, causing an additional 50% - 125% LI.
OK. The actual formula is
max(high_tri_count, med_tri_count * 2, low_tri_count * 4, lowest_tri_count * 8) / 666.66666-
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Duck Girl made me a low-poly mesh hoodie and sneakers for my animesh NPCs. For those, 666 triangles = 1 LI, so there's real pressure to keep the triangle count down. That was done to show it was possible. I was hoping that an SL low-poly clothing for animesh market would emerge. But it didn't.
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3 hours ago, animats said:
Firestorm built nicely against the native libraries on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS. It didn't for 16.04 LTS, and I'm told it doesn't for 20.04 LTS, but I haven't tried.
Oops, need to clarify. That's about compiling Firestorm from source code. Running it is much easier.
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On a related note, a common experience in SL is going someplace where there are a number of avatars standing around, not moving, not talking, and they won't respond to you. This is upsetting to new users.
Sometimes they're bots. Sometimes they're AFK. Sometimes they're playing Tiny Empires.
Now, this seems to be mostly a problem with Linden-run safe hubs. It's not a problem with the Firestorm new user island, or New Residents Inc, or Caledon Oxbridge. Those are not default dumping grounds for teleport failures and region restarts.
What happens when the region you're in restarts may need a rethink. Right now, you get teleported to a "safe hub". That's fine. But you're not supposed to stay there.
Maybe the place to which avatars get teleported on region failure should be a room in a safe hub full of teleporters to elsewhere. A mini Portal Park, like the one at Firestorm Help Island. That provides some encouragement to move on.
Avatars which do nothing at a Linden safe hub for an extended period should be placed on a seat in a waiting room. Provide a few rows of airport waiting room furniture. That makes it clear who's inactive. It's a custom to not bother people in waiting rooms, so this makes sense socially. It's harmless to the avatar, and not annoying. If you go away while logged in, you find that your avatar has taken a seat in the waiting room. Reasonable enough.
A Linden experience can handle the mechanics of that.
Suggested avatar waiting room. Please take a seat.
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8 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:
The writing has been on the wall for the Linux native client since the start. It doesn't build against system libraries like every other Linux application.
Firestorm built nicely against the native libraries on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS. It didn't for 16.04 LTS, and I'm told it doesn't for 20.04 LTS, but I haven't tried.
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9 minutes ago, arabellajones said:
Linden Lab seems totally unable to support a viewer running on Linux
The current LL viewer runs on Linux under the Wine 6.0 emulator. Even voice works. This is on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
However, the LL auto-updater crashes in that environment. That's not fatal; you can still use SL, but each time you log in, you get error messages as the auto-updater crashes. I've filed a JIRA.
Firestorm for Linux works fine. Including voice chat, although you may have to install some 32-bit libraries and run Vivox under Wine, which happens automatically. I've filed a Firestorm bug report asking that Firestorm check that all the components Vivox needs are present, since Vivox itself is too dumb to do that. Voice calls (non-local chat) don't seem to work.
Philip Rosedale's company, "High Fidelity" is now selling their own voice chat system. Maybe SL will convert.
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3 hours ago, Nanuk Fyrewik said:
And why? What on earth is a brand new resident so horrifically guilty of, for crying out loud?
SL isn't new user hostile. It's new-user indifferent. This can be frustrating.
There are new user friendly places, of course. Almost all places of business, and all roads, are open to all users. Some of the more visible pretty destinations do restrict new users. Those are usually isolated private islands. Mainland is seldom that restricted, although some people wall off their parcels with ban lines. Usually those are residences.
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Clean room boots, class 1000. Standard commercial product.
So that's roughly what you want.
You could start with this basic, full perm, all assets boot kit from Meli Imako. They're very plain Ugg-style boots. Rexturing alone would get you adequate clean room boots. Wrinkles can be drawn in. For a first cut, just put a wrinkled paper texture onto the boot model.
If you take the 3D model into Blender, you can remove some shoe details, simplify, and make a closer match to RL clean room boots. Boost the width and height about 20% so they fit over existing shoes. You can probably advertise for someone to do this for you. Depends on how accurate a model you need.
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If you really want a fast bike, go to one of the tracks that has many shops. 2RAW Extreme has about 20 sellers of cars and bikes. Try them on the track. You're limited more by how well you can drive than by how fast the vehicle can go.
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Some of those bots need to be made smarter. There's a stack of them piled up behind a sign at the Oritz safe hub in Zindra. If you're going to put scripted agents in world, please do enough scripting that when they end up somewhere useless, they recover, or alarm, or something.
Maybe SL should require that to operate a bot, you must have a private parcel they can use as home. Then, when lost, they go to their own home, instead of piling up at the Linden centers for homeless avatars.
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I'd like to see "away" avatars (no recent inputs from the viewer) displayed on the map with a different color dot. That would make it clearer which ones have a user, or at least a semi-intelligent program, behind them.
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Bicycle, or motorcycle?
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Set up a personal lighting environment with a white ambient light and no sun or moon, and you'll get something close to what you want.
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Yes, please make that connection.
There are a few other places in world where things almost connect, but that's for another day.
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3 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:
I've always completely ignored the whole offline/online indicator thing in profiles because I found it wildly unreliable.
Yes. I've seen "offline" with someone I'm standing in front of, and we're both friends.
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Here's a good overview of that style.
"American Look" (1958), sponsored by Chevrolet. From the Library of Congress film preservation project.
An excellent overview of mid-century American design.
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And, for the commercial district...
It's Un-American to miss the Cavalcade of Chrome! That would be a fun build for a shopping event.
There's a whole series of Bruce McCall takes on mid-century design. He did many New Yorker covers with such themes.
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Add your suggestions for names for Fantasy regions
in Linden Homes
Posted
Gygax, Narnia, Rivendell, Westeros, The Shire, and Tolkien regions already exist.