animats

I thought of applying, just to show off my NPCs. But I looked at all the terms and details and thought, "nah, too much bother, and they'd complain about the script overhead".

My suggestions for mainland: Mole work Roads through some of the big empty areas, such as Corsica's interior. Finish unfinished land edges in a few places, such as southeast Zindra. A few more water sims so that the continents, now connected, allow sailing. Fix road potholes where less advanced vehicles fall through. A few bridges, and the standard Zindra road corner and road, need overlapping prims extending into the next region. Fix excessive break angles on a few roads and bridges, mostly in Heterocera. Fix the two broken bridges (one on Sansara, one in Satori) where you're supposed to jump at high speed. Many vehicles can't make that jump. Find all ban lines that touch Linden water or roads, and put up can buoys or traffic cones to mark them. Mark all Linden rez zones, using the standard signs and the Bellessaria road and water markers. Buoys at region corners at the outer limits of sailable water, like Bellessaria has. Fix the derailed trams in Hyperion. Fix daytime being too dark by default. (Ambient lighting level needs a boost.) New user related Overhaul new user areas, getting advice from Firestorm, New Residents, and Caledon Oxbridge. Take a look at Cocoon, the cyberpunk roleplay sim, for how they ease new users into the experience. Cocoon used to just have a huge info dump on new users, but now they have signboards, NPCs, and things to do to teach you their complicated roleplay. Maybe use Hyperion on the Sharp Continent as a large new user welcome city. It's not being used much since the Teen Grid shut down. Add explanatory stuff to discover. Not all in one place. Like, have a free restaurant that serves meals, with a clear explanation of how to use it. Have a vehicle rezzer, with an explanation of how to drive. Areas near new user entry points need to be well curated. Not just the Linden owned part. New user entry points should have businesses near them, well-chosen ones. Some are very bad. Social Island 10 and the Ungren Safe Hub are particularly bad. Policy Bellessaria covenant rules on allowed altitudes for skyboxes. Bellessaria covenant rules on security orbs. Offer a free land swap and move to an isolated Linden owned sim for anyone who doesn't like that.

llTargetOmega is for when you want something to spin, like a wheel or a windmill, but don't care too much about the exact rotational position. It does spinning with low overhead. If you need precision control, use llSetRot or llSetKeyframedMotion. Note that llSetKeyframedMotion final positions are not precise, just close. Errors increase under heavy load. In general, stick to one form of motion control at a time. If you're doing SetRot/SetPos, don't use omega or keyframed motion on the same prim. If you need to use more than one mode, allow about 1 second of settling time between modes. The different control systems are not interlocked against conflicting updates.

Again, you don't need an experience for that. You can just use llSay to announce stations. llWhisper for smaller vehicles, so as not to annoy neighbors. You can pop up a dialog, but that's annoying, because the user has to dismiss the dialog. A more elegant solution would be to make up a proper subway roll sign. It's been a long time since I rode the Lexington Avenue Local. Make up a single image which contains all the station texts, and have a script adjust its offset to change the sign. There are signs available on Marketplace which allow you to set the text, but they lag badly, because they have to load too much image content.

Adult, actually. It's in Kama City on Zindra, one sim over from Kama City Municipal Park. (Which, incidentally, is one of Kama City's few rez zones.)

Oops, sorry. Cocoon entry point: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Esperia/237/166/4086

Decentraland is getting a huge amount of press coverage. Somebody just paid US$900K for a big parcel. But what Decentraland doesn't talk about is their user count. Here's the current user count for Decentraland, by region. Right now, 245 users are connected. That's all. It's late at night, but SL right now has 33857 connected users. Decentraland has 90,000 parcels of 16x16 meters. That's about 350 Second Life regions, about the size of Gaeta 5 or Zindra. (I think those are the right numbers. Checking.)

Related to this, there's a nice feature LL could implement to allow user-created water to be swimmable. Add a pathfinding type of "Water". You'd tag water in pools or small lakes with that. It would be treated as "Solid obstacle" for pathfinding purposes, but would affect the water height returned by llWater when over such an area. So boats and swim HUDs would automatically recognize water in a standard way.

But not directly. And if you're renting out a stack of skydomes, you don't want another landlord upstream of you. Corsica is an interesting case. By buying only part of a region, building a skydome stack, and making the domes so ugly at ground level that nobody will buy anything else in the region, the skydome operator gets the compute power of a full region at a fraction of the cost.

One does not simply walk into Mordor. https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Experia/235/208/3009 Start at the Experia entry point, get an OOC tag, walk through the entry portal, be teleported, walk to a cab, click on the cab, select Luxxon Plaza, and be teleported again. To eat at the restaurant, you have to sign up for RP and get some RP credits. Cocoon expects you to wear an OOC tag if not roleplaying. Not wearing one does not seem to have lethal consequences, although some things won't work for you. There's also a taco place and a deli. Gigabites seems to have been replaced by food vending machines.

Yes. The abandoned interior of Corsica, which is about 10 regions, needs more roads. All the development is near roads. Unfortunately, the potential value of that area has been destroyed. World of ugly low-altitude skydomes. And no, you can't just derender them. They have large numbers of objects. This is part of what could be a large, pretty valley. LL needs to offer isolated regions for people who want isolation. The people who want walls, skydomes, and other stuff unrelated to their neighbors should be able to buy parcels on a non-continent, rather than messing up mainland. I'd like to see a deal where LL offers a land swap and a free move to an isolated region to anyone who has a walled off or domed area on mainland. Then apply something like the Bellesaria covenant to mainland. It would be a win for the isolated users. In an isolated region, the viewer isn't trying to get info about neighboring regions, so it goes a bit faster. So this is a win for the walled-off parcel owners.

The interior of Corsica makes this clear. There are entire abandoned mainland sims of bare rock hills. All the development is near roads or water.

I'm lost somewhere in the forest of weeping willows with crystals.

It sure is. I just visited the BeYou region. I thought it was just a farming system, but they've gone way beyond that. They have their own furniture, their own kitchens, their own appliances, their own bathrooms (there are lots of toiletries to buy and use up), their own phones, their own food... It's a whole MMORPG within SL, with hundreds of purchaseable in-game items, most or all no-copy. I'm not sure what to think of this. It's a walled garden, but it seems well-executed.

I've made that trip. It's nice. You end up at a club with a dock and rez zone. That's as far north as you can get by boat in that area. Going east or west along the coast will run you into obstacles or ban lines. There is also a 512m^2 parcel with ban lines and no keep-out buoys messing up the waterway, as noted.

I know that, of course. But this is about restaurants in SL. Here's what I'm talking about. This is Kitsune, in Cocoon, a busy MMORPG within Second Life. "Come for the neon. Stay for the intrigue". Menu: 1.Spicy Ramen - 50c +100 HP +46 Dice Dmg +10 Rage [20] _ 2.Tofu-Takoyaki - 10c +40 HP +40 Dice Dmg Synths or OOCs will not be served. Payment is in Coccon's roleplay currency, which you can buy with Lindens to get started, but should try to win in-game.

As Lucia points out, the "sit" system does not work for animesh. Worse, animesh can't access the animations inside seats. It's an IP policy thing. You can sit on things you don't own, which results in the unusual case of a linkset where not all the links have the same ownership. But you can't lend an animation to a different user unless it's copy and transfer. So "sittter" scripts can't interact usefully with animesh, even if both sides are programmed for that.

The Nolo Press books on copyright and trademark are useful if you want to understand what you're legally allowed to do. If it involves Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Citizen], or the Marvel Overextended Universe, don't go there. They have strong rights-enforcement departments, and besides, that stuff has been done to death. Do something original.

Check the SL ad policy. Spamming messages in chat off-parcel is a TOS violation. So are ads which include adult content. If they're doing either of those things, just submit an abuse request from the viewer. You can suggest to the landowner that they consider swapping their parcel for one in Zindra, the adult continent. Then their tacky adult parcel can compete with less-tacky adult parcels, which may induce them to up their game.

Now that's a good review. His main complaints: Frame rate sucks. He's right. SL users are way too tolerant of low frame rates. That's fixable, but it takes a viewer rewrite. (I can say more on that in a more technical forum.) "What do I do now?" - SL's big question. He wants to find a place where he can hang out and talk to people. The Destination Guide sent him to three clubs where he was immediately kicked out for being too new, and was angry about that. He got to Social Island 10. He finally made it to London City, but was stuck at 2 FPS. Interestingly, he never talked to anybody. Slow rezzing. He made it to some places which would have been more interesting after a minute of asset loading. This is a big problem in stores with large numbers of vendors. If the nearer textures loaded first, new users would have more to look at, and it would be clearer what's going on. The reviewer expected instant response and instant understandability. He abandoned anything as soon as it wasn't immediately obvious what to do next. It's an incompatibility with the style of SL. Most of online today is set up for instant gratification. While most of SL isn't like that, more of the new user experience needs to be. A big fraction of the population is not methodical, and SL is designed for methodical people. This is a classic game design problem. The new user experience starts with what game designers call a "track ride" - you go from station to station in a fixed order and are more or less locked to the game's track. Then you exit, and you're out in the open with some options ahead. This is the "now what?" moment. New users are not quite prepared for that. Social Island 10 is the Port Authority Bus Terminal of Second Life. "If Hell had a Hell", that terminal has been called. It's big, has lots of traffic, is confusing, provides little guidance to new arrivals, the information desk isn't staffed, and homeless people get stuck there. That's the new user introduction to Second Life. All Lindens should spend an hour a week there as a helper. Both because the place needs some staffing, and so that SL employees understand the problems of new users. LL tries to help with that new user HUD which lets you check off achievements. The reviewer noticed the HUD attach, but that just confused him, and he ignored it. At some points, the reviewer mentions being scared. He knows others are watching him, and maybe judging him. Some of the rushing through everything comes from that. That's worth thinking about. Middle school kids have been beaten up in real life for being a default in Fortnite. There can be a real fear factor in joining SL.

This is from an article about why Roblox is so successful: The Metaverse’s allure lies in its limitlessness, familiar and well-organised structure and the exciting way in which it allows young people to interact both with each other, the brands and characters that populate it, as well as the narratives that unfold within it. Vitally, children and teenagers are moulding the Roblox metaverse in real-time, defining it as the community grows and interconnects in a collaborative and interactive way. The Metaverse has been designed to specifically integrate key values shared by generations Z and Alpha. This includes the ability to showcase your unique identity, to make friends, to enter and participate in an immersive environment, cross-platform compatibility, having diverse interests catered to, an ease of use and the avoidance of a steep learning curve, an in-built commerce system, as well as having a space that combines politeness and trust. OK, let's look at that list for SL: showcase your unique identity - got that. to make friends - got that. to enter and participate in an immersive environment - got that. cross-platform compatibility - SL is still very weak on mobile. having diverse interests catered to - got that. an ease of use and the avoidance of a steep learning curve - do NOT have that. an in-built commerce system - got that. as well as having a space that combines politeness and trust - some places in SL, yes. That's not bad for SL. It indicates that ease of use and avoidance of a steep learning curve are the main lacks. We know that, of course. It's useful, though, to have lists from the outside for LL's incoming top management, when hired.

For more realistic avatars, we need some rendering fixes. A subsurface scattering layer would help. Subsurface scattering example. Left picture has subsurface scattering, right picture does not. Light from skin is mostly returned from layers just below the surface. Subsurface scattering shaders emulate that. Without subsurface scattering, all you can do is turn the specular reflectance up or down, which means you can adjust between "dead" and "plastic". Trying to boost SL avatar skin above "dead" results in so much specular reflectance you can see the outline of the sun on skin. This starts the climb out of the "uncanny valley", in which avatars look creepy. Hollywood passed through this point about 20 years ago. Here's the trailer for The Polar Express (2004), often described as "creepy". They had the modeling right, the animation almost right, but didn't have the rendering right. Looks kind of like SL, doesn't it? Hollywood was getting out of that hole by the mid-2000s, and games climbed out of it about a decade later. It's about time for SL to make that trip. The way materials work in SL, adding a new layer is backwards-compatible. Viewers that don't know about it will ignore it.

Memory in use in scripts is reported before garbage collection. Until you run out and force a garbage collection, the heap just increases. If you really need an accurate memory usage, you can do this: integer memlimit = llGetMemoryLimit(); // how much are we allowed? llSetMemoryLimit(memlimit-1); // reduce by 1 to force GC llSetMemoryLimit(memlimit); // set it back integer freemem = llGetFreeMemory(); // get free memory left after GC, hopefully larger. Don't do this too often. I do this when free memory seems to be getting too small, to see if the problem is real or whether it's just time for a garbage collections. My NPCs do this to decide whether they can continue allocating memory or need to take some corrective action to conserve memory.

You can just have particles fall from her wand under gravity while she does a twirl. That will get you a spiral.

"Was" is appropriate. NFT sales seem to have dropped 90% since May. The next "metaverse" thing is branding. Gucci is in Roblox. Sothebys is is Decentraland. There's something new in avatars, the Wolf3d.io avatar creator. This creates an avatar based on a picture, usually a selfie. Sominium Space and VRChat, among many others, are using this. The consumer product is called "Ready Player Me". It's a clever bit of marketing. While the avatar appears in someone else's virtual world, it's fetched from a URL from Wolf3d each time it's used. Clothes changes are done via their site. So, once you have their avatar, you're tied to their clothing store. It's free. For now. SL once had an avatar from picture system. What happened to that?