animats

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?

LL was able to hire some good graphics people, who are focusing on the graphics part of the system. Also, graphics is well understood, and some of the viewer problems were just from using old technology. We all had a good talk about this at the last Creator User Group. Server side is less well understood. It looks like Simon Linden gets stuck with all the hard bugs, and there's only one of him.

Is it leaking open listeners? See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Listen.

I'm looking for a set of walks and runs for my NPCs. I need a set much like an AO set, but with more speed options. Bento NPC, non-bento run. I have a set now, but they're non-bento. When the NPCs are not walking or running, they run various bento anims, and those leave some bento joints in the spine set. So I need some that drive all the bento spine joints. I'd like to get several speeds of walk and run that ease in and out from each other well. The NPCs change speed as they move, slowing for turns and obstacles, and I'm trying to make that look better. I've been looking, but I can't find a set that play well together. Full perm. Will pay appropriately.

There's already the Outfit Gallery, which does something like that. But you have to upload a picture of the outfit yourself.

Unfortunately, it's not in the MoleMart in Leafminer. They do have the wall textures for Corsica roads, though.

Possibly SL's best large building. Go to NTBI region; you can't miss it. It's fully detailed inside. Lobby, offices, elevators, escalators, parking garage, mall, restaurant, restrooms, emergency stairs...

In your video on making SL more immersive, you hide almost all the controls and minimize the ones that are left.

Suppose we had "play mode", where there's a very clean screen with very few controls, as Luca suggests, and "create mode", where the 3D pane shrinks and toolbars appear at top, bottom, and sides?

Turns out Kool Door doesn't do that, but Scobas does. This solved a problem for me. I'd built a bathroom in part of my Linden Traditional home in Bellessaria, but had trouble fitting in a door. This folding door worked out nicely. Open Closed Nice smooth folding action. There's also a 4-door version, and it's full perm, so you can change the art or doors if you want. All mesh. It does drop out at lowest LOD (it's mesh, and they could have used their 8 triangles at lowest LOD better.) So, not recommended for exterior doors, because it will become see-through at distance. The creator's web site seems to be gone, but their in-world store is present. So, no instructions. I could have read the scripts if I had to. I didn't have to. It's surprisingly robust. I made the doors narrower and thinner, and rotated them, and the script did the right thing automatically. Nice to see that.

I'd make most of the graphics adjustments automatic. When frame rate drops below 20FPS, reduce LOD, draw distance, number of non-impostor avatars, etc. to get the frame rate back up.

That's a really hard problem. SL allocates resources to land, permanently. The world continues to run even if nobody is nearby. This makes SL a living virtual world. But there's no way in the SL architecture to allocate more resources to an area that has lots of avatars in it. Still, the fact that regions choke at 40-50 avatars is probably a fixable problem. Getting to 200 avatars, now that's tough.

I think that's an option with Kool Door. Find their in-world store, where they have all the options set up, and I think there's one there.

I went to Firestorm Help Island yesterday, talked to the helpers, and visited all the teleport gates. Their new user experience is pretty good. Something LL could copy. They usually have live helpers on duty. They get people unstuck, and keep the place pleasant. While I was there, they got someone with an open microphone to mute it, for example. This avoids the hell of the Linden safe hubs. They have a small freebie store, and a portal to more freebie stores. So people can get out of their default. They have various portals - freebies, games, adventure, roleplay, adult - which send users to other curated locations. Each portal has a list of locations, and you get one at random. They have a social area, where people can just hang out and talk. It's within range of the helpers. That seems to work. It's not rocket science.

I've likened entering SL to arriving in a new city. The city offers a broad range of things, gives you little guidance, and is indifferent to you. For some people, this is a challenge. (Famously, Madonna arrived in NYC at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, alone, and clawed her way up from there.) Others are totally overwhelmed. An easy path for the totally overwhelmed would help. There's the opposite approach. "Can you handle the Metaverse?" You start with a basic avatar and no money. Then it's all up to you. Second Life has the best looking avatars of any virtual world - if you can buy or make or find a good one. Second Life lets you build almost anything - if you can create objects in 3D. Second Life has roleplay - if you can meet the standards of the roleplay groups. Second Life has profitable businesses - if you can run a business. Second Life even has sex - if you can find someone who will have sex with you. Second Life. It's not just a game. It's a whole world. On hard mode.

If you're a default, the big kids will beat you up and take your lunch money. That's a real thing in Fortnite. “ In a viral video with 3 million views, one kid describes how classmates would beat him up for not having any Fortnite skins." I have seen more than one unhappy new player at the Firestorm help island who got stuck with "70s Disco Guy With Radio". That's an insult to new players. The female default, "woman with big floppy hat and dog in purse" is at least good looking. Since many new SL users will have played Fortnite, and think of a "default" as being bad, that needs to be handled better at entry.

You can just order a new one from Linden Lab. Contact Linden Estate Sales.