animats

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.

There are probably a half dozen under-utilized Gorean sims still around.

Metahuman Creator is out now. I've run it. It's free if the output goes into only Unreal Engine games. In any case, you can play with it. It's mostly a collection of premade heads and bodies you can tweak. The hair system is kind of nice; when you change hairstyles, the new hair fluffs out, and then the physics system lets it fall into place, not going through the skin. Then, once set, it become part of the head. So, not a full dynamic hair system, but some automation. I think clothing works the same way. One physics run during building, then it's just rigged mesh. SL should have that for clothing. As you get dressed, or appear in scene, clothing physics should run once, adjust all the offsets to avoid layers penetrating, and then lock in the rigging for fast running.

Neither Unreal Engine nor Unity is a good match for SL. The big game engines are intended for a specific workflow. Level designers build a game map with objects offline. They optimize the assets. There's a huge amount of asset prepping that takes place before the game assets go into the game. This allows many performance optimizations SL cannot do. For example, in most games, houses are never see-through; even if they have transparent windows, you rarely can see in one side and out the other. So everything behind a building can be ignored when rendering. GTA, for example, uses this heavily. Second Life does not work like that. Everything is dynamic. Even terrain. This is extremely rare in gaming. Most user-modifiable worlds are either modified offline (Sansar, Decentraland, Sinespace) or are voxel-based and blocky (Minecraft, Roblox, Dual Universe). Some games let you have high-detail objects in world, but you can only use or combine the pre-optimized ones. (The Sims). There just isn't an off the shelf solution for SL-type worlds. Unreal Engine 5 is a bit more runtime-dynamic than Unreal Engine 4, but still relies extensively on offline asset prepping. (I've been looking at this pretty hard, and have been building some things over the last few months. Many of these problems can be overcome. Developers who want to discuss the technical details, IM me in or out of world.)

Go for it! And report back how it's going. I loaded up UE5 Early Access and built some of the demos. I'm not a UE expert, though. There are people on SL who are, and I'd like to hear from them. The special cases in the Nanite demo are a little too special. Huge areas of rocks, and large numbers of instances of the same thing. LOD algorithms do great on rocks. I want to see some buildings. And a thousand instances of the same statue are easy, because you only need it in memory once with Nanite. SL has little instancing; most objects in a scene are unique. The UE5 lighting is very nice. Nice bounce lighting. The new animation system with "full body IK" is interesting. SL really needs an IK system. IK is a lot more interesting if you have info about where the nearby objects are, which would require some physical model in the viewer. UE5 has machinery for streaming large areas seamlessly. Let us know how that works.

Yes, it's fixable.

"I feel quite strongly that more hardware is not a viable path forward. In my experience a significant percentage of participants in SL do so on a shoestring RL budget. Their computers / graphics cards hobble along at the lowest of settings (Atmospheric shaders, longer draw distances, etc. are use selectively and cautiously if at all), their internet connections are slow, even intermittent, they have free accounts and what money they have in SL comes from some kind of job there. In short expecting these people and the many others who stretched their RL budgets for somewhat better hardware for a better SL to spend money on fancy sensors and trackers is naive at best." - Comment on Philip Rosedale speech in 2014. This is a good point. Since then, it's become worse. Graphics price/performance has decreased in recent years. The average Steam user has an NVidia 1060, which is a pretty good graphics card. Original retail price, in 2016, was $249. Today, it costs $549, used. NVidia's current entry level video card costs around US$330. The reasons for this include the move to thin laptops with cooling problems, the backlog at TSMC, the cryptocurrency mining community buying up a big fraction of graphics cards, 5nm fabs costing $20 billion each, and NVidia discovering that gamers would pay over US$1000 for a GPU card. Most people are using laptops, and they have to take whatever GPU the laptop manufacturer gives them. Unless you buy a "gamer laptop", something that starts around US$1350, you get a rather modest GPU. Compare that with typical US$200-$500 laptops. The effect is that the average consumer PC just does not have enough graphics power to run SL well. So, the mass-market virtual worlds look rather cartoony at the moment. See Facebook Horizons, Roblox, Minecraft, etc.

Oops, that was supposed to be a private message. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Having to pay KDU is Firestorm's biggest cost. I'm currently struggling with using OpenJPEG to decode SL's J2K images. Most of the time, it works. Sometimes it fails, mainly in older areas. For example, Tabor sim, next to the Ivory Tower of Prims, has two textures that OpenJPEG can't decode. GIMP and two online decode sites can't decode them either. They were apparently uploaded with a known bad compressor.

Too late for that. Tilia was started over five years ago. If that business was going anywhere, it would have more than one customer by now.

And now, Tilia. Tilia, LL's payment business, has failed. They're not going to be the next Stripe or the next Coinbase. Tilia has one (1) customer outside the LL ecosystem - Upland. Tilia doesn't even have full bank-level connections - they pay out through PayPal, not ACH, FedWire, or SEPA. They don't have the volume to play with the big boys. But they're still hiring expensive people for Tilia. There were previously two jobs for payments lawyers, and those have disappeared from the list, presumably filled. On the Second Life side, the VP of Engineering slot, to replace Oz Linden, who just retired, remains open. So no one is driving. On the technical side, the problems are clear. There's a lot of legacy code, and not enough good people to rewrite it. There's an additional problem. Anyone good enough to haul the SL viewer and server system up to current technology can make about $200K/year in Silicon Valley. Those are the junior people, of whom they would need about a half dozen. The VP level job needs to pay $300K-$350K a year in San Francisco. Worse, working on Second Life internals is career suicide for a young programmer. It's all unique technology inside. After spending a few years getting up to speed on the internals of SL, you have acquired no new saleable skills for your resume. You know all about Linden Lab Serialized Data, Second Life Mesh Representation, Linden Scripting Language, Second Life Network Protocol, and how prims work. All of which have zero value for getting your next job. Plus, you have the stigma of coming from a company on the way down. However, if LL dumped Tilia, they could probably afford getting out of this hole.

That is one of SL's marketing problems. They really need to work on reputation repair. Being banned from Twitch is embarrassing. Being not taken seriously is worse. Thanks. LL people have vaguely mentioned improving the new user experience. That alone would help with the immediate turn-off of new users. Exercise for Lindens reading this: Go to a new user "safe hub", preferably with a non-Linden account. Stay there for an hour and just listen and watch.

Yes. An important point. Linden Lab is good at running this world. It's run like a municipality - they keep the power on, maintain the streets and public services, provide some minimal enforcement, collect property taxes, and otherwise don't bother the residents much. It works. That's not how game companies see their worlds. They insist on a dictatorship, with them in charge. Most of the other virtual worlds with significant user counts have heavy-handed control by secret police. LL's land system diffuses most of that power in the hands of individual landowners. LL does have Governance, a small staff that responds only to serious problems. There are Governance meetings once a month. They're boring, like city council meetings. Worth getting out there is why Second Life works as a society. I have my arguments with LL, but mostly over the aging technology.

Dual Universe is planet-scale huge, but it may not hold up as people build more stuff on the planets. There's a fixed monthly charge. You can build but you have to mine raw materials first. They let you script, so you can automate things. You can take over land, but may have to defend it. The designers thought that would keep people from paving over the planets. Luca Grabacr, who makes those great SL videos, went over there, and started mining. After three months she had worked up to "Fur Admiral Luca", with three full-scale carriers and their smaller spacecraft, a base, a temple, and automated factory operations. Then Dual Universe changed the rules so that no one person could build that much. Luca's comments on that: https://youtu.be/qfIrKJkP0bc More recent news is about the CEO being kicked upstairs to a board seat, and game reviews along the lines of "Is DU a dead game?"

Well, almost. Here's how it works, from the Unreal Engine documentation: During import: meshes are analyzed and broken down into hierarchical clusters of triangle groups. During rendering: clusters are swapped on the fly at varying levels of detail based on the camera view, and connect perfectly without cracks to neighboring clusters within the same object. Data is streamed in on demand so that only visible detail needs to reside in memory. Nanite runs in its own rendering pass that completely bypasses traditional draw calls. It's a level of detail system. A good one, where the LOD switches take place for parts of the mesh, not the whole object all at once. All this is integrated with the streaming system and the rendering system to make it work without highly visible LOD switches. In the current Early Access UE5, it only works on rigid objects. Not avatars or clothing. Also, it takes considerable hardware to make this go. Recommended system specs are 64GB of RAM, 8 CPUs, and a NVidia 2060 or better. Or a Playstation 5, which has 24 GB, all directly accessible from both GPU and SSD, so they can move data to the GPU really fast. This is far more graphics power than most SL users have. Epic claims the quality degrades gracefully on lower-end hardware, all the way down to "a 3 year old Android phone". This has implications for Second Life. Second Life has a huge collection of high-quality content with terrible lower levels of detail. With this new approach to automatic LOD, it may become possible to use all that great content without so much degradation at lower LODs. I have a a UE dev account (which is free until you make a million dollars in revenue, then they want 5%), so I downloaded and built UE5 Early Access, and built one of the provided demos. It worked. I may spend a little time with it and bring in some complex geometry to watch the Nanite system do its LOD thing. More on this later. I'm not much of an Unreal Engine user, though. There are some SL users with serious Unreal Engine experience. Comments?

You can also go to New Resident Island, where walkthrough tutorials takes you through the process of using Ruth (female) or Roth (male). Both are BOM and compatible with classic texture clothing. Ruth fits much clothing intended for classic female avatars, although not perfectly. Roth fits clothing intended for classic male avatars, but the fit is not very good. (Ankles and wrists too small, shoulder angles a bit off, close-fitting clothing may not work.) Unfortunately, there's almost nothing purpose-built for Ruth and Roth. Ruth and Roth are totally open source; you can get all the files from Github and bring them into Blender.