[Dear Patch Linden]

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.

[Second life marketplace unreachable through firefox web browser]

I'm not seeing a problem. I looked at the browser log to see if it didn't like anything:

• Cookie “_slm_session” will be soon rejected because it has the “SameSite” attribute set to “None” or an invalid value, without the “secure” attribute. To know more about the “SameSite“ attribute, read https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Set-Cookie/SameSite marketplace.secondlife.com
• Ignoring unsupported entryTypes: largest-contentful-paint. marketplace.secondlife.com:6:16999
• No valid entryTypes; aborting registration. marketplace.secondlife.com:6:16999
• Ignoring unsupported entryTypes: layout-shift. marketplace.secondlife.com:6:17095
• Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=GTM-NTP4ZDK”. marketplace.secondlife.com:1:1
• Cookie “” has been rejected as third-party. gtm.js
• This page uses the non standard property “zoom”. Consider using calc() in the relevant property values, or using “transform” along with “transform-origin: 0 0”. marketplace.secondlife.com
• JQMIGRATE: Migrate is installed, version 3.0.1 application-f0edea18a8b197ada1ccbcb67742677e.js:30909:19
• Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://cdn.optimizely.com/js/981600111.js”. marketplace.secondlife.com:20:1
• The resource at “https://js-agent.newrelic.com/nr-1209.min.js” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

I have third party cookies, trackers and ads blocked, but that didn't seem to impact anything important. None of the above errors are serious.

 

[Dear Patch Linden]

Classic Linden homes. Mostly vacant.

There's an Eichler-type house on Marketplace.

If that's what you want, you can get it now.

A whole neighborhood of those houses on mainland, with a '50s car in every driveway, would be amusing. Put in a 50's diner and soda fountain, a drive-in theater, and a gas station. Or find a roadside area that has the retail and some abandoned land out back, and build a subdivision.

[Is there a website which tracks members and online-stats for Second Life and other grids?]

21 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Minecraft is off the chart. It's an absolute monster that just keeps getting bigger.

I know. It took them ten years of steady growth. And rewriting their system several times.

Since they recently went public, you can read their SEC registration filing, which tells a lot about where they  are and where they're going.

I met the Roblox CEO a long time ago, when he had a tiny physics engine company in an an alley off 8th St south of Market in San Francisco. Back then he was making educational products.

[Is there a website which tracks members and online-stats for Second Life and other grids?]

19 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I am amazed we still get concurrency.

Probably because others could obtain it by sampling.

For what it's worth,  here are concurrency numbers for SL and competitors, with links to the data source.

• Second LIfe (47,211 now)
• Decentraland. (201 now.) That's the server status page.
• Sominum Space (31 now.) Click on "Visit popular parcel" to see the busiest parcels and add up the numbers.
• Roblox (1,798,621 now)
• VRchat (16,925 now)
• IMVU - no info source found
• Facebook Horizons - no info source found
• Minecraft - no info source found

 

[Future of the metaverse, and all that]

Then, there's Sominium Space. This was supposed to be a high-end metaverse. Supports VR, supposedly scalable to very large sizes, allows building. I hadn't looked at in a while. Today I did.

This is the map of Sominium Space. The whole world. A "small" parcel, the smallest size square you see there, is 200 m^2.

The most popular parcel right now. 6 users, somewhere. This is with the web client, which is limited, but you can log in and chat.

I thought this whole system was on Spatial OS and very scaleable. But apparently not. It's not very big, and the busiest parcel has 6 users right now. All the listed "popular parcels" together have 22 connected users.

You can build, using what seems to be a dumbed-down version of Unity. You can place and color objects from their inventory. You can't make new mesh objects. You then upload your entire parcel.

They have events. Here's the calendar.

A full schedule of exciting events!

This place sucks.

(But they get more press than Second Life.)

 

[Future of the metaverse, and all that]

On 6/19/2021 at 8:42 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Decentraland is all the right combination of buzzwords and BS to get tech journos excited, and none of the things actual users of such a service might want. It's all about the investment and making money and hype rockets to the moon. It has no appeal outside the thirsty cult of crypto.

More true than I thought. Here's the link for Decentraland's concurrent user count:

https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/

Right now, 199 users are online there. Highest I've seen is 360, on a Friday evening. That's after 16 months of operation. They're going nowhere as a virtual world.

Worry about IMVU and Roblox, which have far higher user counts than SL and are steadily improving.

[Would Second Life Benefit from an Engine Rebuild?]

4 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

One thing to consider is that user made LODS when people actually make them have the capacity to be much better than anything a computer could generate. Automatically generating LODS on items like these would waste the work of creators who actually did upload with custom LODS for their models in the past.

You could have a prim property to go between generated and user lods, but I would guess that it would cause the object to increase in Land Impact when the object is changed and thus the end user will stick with the bad LODS.

In all it's a case of incentivizing good building practices and I think wherever a system is created it will be gamed. A more human approach is needed.

A more evaluated approach is needed.

There are many image matching programs available. Ones that compare two images and tell you how closely they match are easy today. This makes LODs testable. Render from a few viewpoints at high LOD, downscale the image with a little blur, and compare that with similar images  of lower LODs. That tells you if the lower LOD is no good.

Then focus automatic LOD re-generation on the ones where the image comparer reports a poor match between LODs. That should catch all the see-through lower LODs.

[Would Second Life Benefit from an Engine Rebuild?]

Looking at SL visual quality, the highest level of detail for most objects is pretty good. Lower levels of detail, not so much. What can be done about that?

Here's an idea I haven't seen discussed: a mesh-reducing edge server.

Suppose you had a server front-ending the asset servers, but with application-specific processing capability. This is called an "edge server" in web jargon. The idea is that it sometimes makes the lower mesh LODs itself, starting from the highest LOD version. This allows using more modern algorithms to improve the LODs of existing content. The new LODs would be cached, so this doesn't get done on every fetch. This doesn't require modifying either the simulator servers or the viewers. It does mean more computers are required.

(The details of this are complicated. First, you need a good mesh reduction system. There are good ones, like Simplygon and the one in UE4/5, and cheap ones as free software on Github. I've tried some of the free ones. They're very brittle; if a mesh isn't entirely correct and watertight, some of the algorithms fail, because they want to work on a volume with a clear inside and outside. That's fixable, but a pain to fix.

Second, most of the newer mesh reduction algorithms do a terrible job on SL clothing. That's because they can't handle thin sheets well. Also, applying mesh reduction to clothing can result in the lower-LOD more blocky mesh pushing through outer layers. Clothing needs special handling.

Third, in SL, normal maps and meshes are totally independent. You'd like to take out fine mesh detail and replace it with normal maps to get the same look. But with SL's formats, that's difficult. The asset servers have no idea which mesh goes with which material; that information takes a different path. For now, that's out as something that can be done as a retrofit.

Fourth, there's no reason to push mesh reduction too hard. Never force the triangle count below 25-100 just to reduce the mesh. It's not really speeding up draw, and often does not even reduce the land impact. That will prevent objects from disappearing at distance due to crap lowest LODs.

Fifth, you only want to control this in the edge server, not do the mesh reduction there. You want to do it only once for all users, so that effort belongs near the asset storage on AWS.)

 

[1 RL meter = 1 SL meter -builders/creators?]

Here's some information on real-world sizes useful for work in Second Life.

Typical real-world size information for objects in Second Life

All dimensions in meters. Data from various architectural sources.
Rounded off to 0.005m.

Furniture

   Dining table height     0.750
   Chair height            0.460
   Kitchen counter height  0.915
   Bar height              1.010
    
Buildings
 
    Door height             2.135 (Real world. SL tends to run bigger due to oversize avatars)
    Door width              0.920 (ADA compatible)
    
    Brick dimensions        0.100 × 0.070 × 0.200
    Cinderblock dimensions  0.410 × 0.200 × 0.200
    Stair tread height      0.180
    Stair tread spacing     0.280

Brick and cinderblock dimensions include mortar, so these values are suitable for repeating textures.
Stair tread spacing is a minimum.

 

If you stay close to these dimensions, but boost door heights a bit, things look reasonably good.

In particular, get stair dimensions right. Off-size stairs look fake, because non-standard stair tread height is very rare in RL.

 

 

[The elevator isn't working.]

Yes. Who made the elevator?

If it's a Delta elevator, which I suspect it is since you're trying to talk to the controller, here's the manual:

https://ntbigroup.com/gentek/buildkit/delta/

For those, you can get support in the NTBI customer group. They're the dominant elevator brand in SL.

(New user hint: almost everything in Second Life was made by a Second Life user. You have to go to the creator or their organization for support. This place works a lot more like real life than games do. Linden Lab is like a municipal government. They build roads and parks, some public buildings, and also build some big suburban subdivisions. Users own most property and create and buy stuff to put on it.)

[The new SL ad.]

It's a great ad.

For Fortnite.

The first part of that looks like Fortnite avatars with Fortnite costume changes. I was expecting them to pop their chute and start gliding to a target.

2009 Second Life ad.

Is the new one better or worse?

[Endless Os]

I wonder if they got it to work.

Endless OS is a locked-down version of LInux, with its own "app store". Technically, it could run Firestorm, if the Flatpak version of Firestorm were current and it was in the Endless OS app store.

There's something to be said for getting SL viewers into the various app stores. Then, less advanced users will be able to use SL more easily. But it's work to do that, and this isn't a big niche.

(The Microsoft app store is out. They, like Apple, don't allow third party payment systems.)

[Chairman of the Board is on LabGab]

13 hours ago, Evangeline Arcadia said:

On the other hand it's destroyed the wonderful culture of inworld creativity that once existed, which is such a shame, and in my view a real lacking.

Good point.

What might work is an integrated clothing design program. More like Marvelous Designer or Tailornova than Blender.

That's a much more constrained problem. Usually, you start from some generic garment pattern, or a previous garment, and work from there. This is much easier on users than dealing with things at the triangle level.

It doesn't have to edit in world. You'd mostly be working locally and uploading. All that would be needed server-side is free-for-the-duration-of-the-login uploads, so you could add some trim to a garment, click "try wearing demo", and your avatar's appearance in world changes as your friends watch and criticize. When you get something worth keeping, then you hit the "add to inventory" button and pay the upload charge.

This could energize amateur clothing creators in SL. Far more people can mod than can start with a blank screen and make something good.

It would finally solve the fit problem, too. Your viewer would bring your avatar's measurements into the clothing design program, and you'd make clothing that fits perfectly.

[Help! Need info about old US Air force equipment]

As for the wind vane that looks like a little airplane without wings, here it is, on eBay:

Wind vane from military base. https://www.ebay.com/itm/313197558958

[Chairman of the Board is on LabGab]

On 6/25/2021 at 11:02 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

have been burnt pretty badly by things that seemed simple at face value (like EEP).

Wasn't EEP an acquisition?

 

On 6/26/2021 at 5:58 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

I find final model prim exports to be a nightmare of hidden and intersecting faces with the overall geometry more suited to a 3d printer than a real time rendering environment.

Yes. Even merging the prims into a single mesh object using Blender's semi-constructive solid geometry functions doesn't work. You can do a union of two mesh objects and drop the useless interior geometry, but what Blender generates is not as simple as it should be.

I don't see in-world editing in SL's future. Everyone else who has in-world editing is voxel-based, like Minecraft, Roblox, and Dual Universe. Most of the newer worlds seem to have people editing outside of the world using the Unity editor. SineSpace (by the way, Breakroom is Sinespace for business), Sominum Space, and Decentraland are all Unity editor based. In Decentraland,  the unit of editing is the entire parcel - you check out your parcel to your local machine, edit, and upload to check it back in to the world. That's worse than what we've got. There's no off the shelf solution to buy or copy for SL-type in-world editing.

(Has anyone tried Blender with NVidia Omniverse? It's an online collaboration system. You're supposed to be able to set up a shared editing session, where multiple people can see what you're doing in 3D as you edit. It could be useful to do that for big projects, like Fantasy Faire.)

[Social Medial is a Playground for Clinical Narcissists]

YouTube is the playground for clinical narcissists. Talking head videos by some neckbeard who starts "Hey guys", talks with no editing, and finishes with demands that you follow their channel - now that's narcissism.

[What is "Dullahan"?]

It's frustrating.

Dullahan  is basically the Google Chrome web browser. It's based on Google Chromium, which is Google Chrome minus some proprietary Google stuff like logging into Google. Also no proprietary digital rights management, which is why you can't watch Netflix, etc. in SL. (If you could, you could copy Netflix content, which is why Google won't let people have an embeddable browser with DRM powers.)

The trouble is, it's a full modern web browser, with all the bloat and tracking that implies. Each media on a prim in your field of view fires up another copy of the monster. That's why you see so many copies of Dullahan. That's why it's such a resource hog.

 

[Which mesh bodies to create for?]

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

The body has a 'bulk' that is a bit hard to fit into some mesh pants. Wear the 'Bulk Alpha'! (provided)

Although fit mesh was the hottest thing when I came out, now most creators rig for certain bodies.  You'll just have to keep looking until you find something.  Have you tried sized mesh instead and adjust your shape accordingly?  With some help from the alphas, I'd imagine that would be easier to find.

Yes, I can bash outfits for standard avatars until they fit Roth. But I'm not willing to pay much for stuff that requires kit-bashing. I'd hoped that New Resident Island giving out Ruth and Roth would generate more activity for those avatars, but it hasn't.

(Ruth is OK, but Roth seems to be just Ruth with a flattened chest. It's a female form. Ankles and wrists are too small, butt is too big.)

[Off-roading?]

Interior of Corsica. Tens of regions of mostly abandoned land.

[Which mesh bodies to create for?]

6 hours ago, Yuukie Onmura said:

... have you checked blueberry...?

Search this store

Keywords: Roth

Blueberry

No matching items found.

[Replacement for Oz hired, according to Grumpity Linden]

Inara Pey's blog reports that, according to Grumpity Linden "The new VP has apparently been hired, and will be starting “soon-ish”." No word on who it is.

https://www.lindenlab.com/careers has LL's current job openings. The one for SL's VP of engineering has disappeared.

Current job openings: 7 for Tilia, 2 for SL. The SL ones are for the customer support call center.

[Are we all being too nice ?]

10 hours ago, Aiyumei said:

I think is more of lag and performance issues that keep people from being in the same place.

That's worth thinking about. RecRoom and VRchat do better with 10 people in the same space than SL does. Why is that?

[Are we all being too nice ?]

People can go and be jerks in world. There are places for that. Social Island 10 comes to mind.

Space is what keeps everyone from being in the same place.

[Chairman of the Board is on LabGab]

Oops. Correct link for Decentraland current user count: https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/

264 logged in right now.