animats

"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.

The only honest number we have is residents online, which is currently 47,668. Each of those has a name and a location in world. That number ranges from around 35,000 to 55,000. Anything from the SL web site is inflated by web bots that will sign up for anything, and people who will put in a email address before they really have to. Web signup counts are not really meaningful. What we'd really like to know is how many new users downloaded the viewer, signed in, got an avatar, finished the tutorial, and left the welcome area to go out into the big world. That's a real "new user". It's far, far smaller than the number of web signups, as you can see by visiting a new user entry point. One major job of a competent marketing organization is to monitor all the steps of onboarding, and see where people abandon the process.

New Babbage has a story hour once a week. People sit around a campfire just north of the railway viaduct outside the city walls. All steampunk, of course.

Builders Brewery has classes. To understand prims, visit the Ivory Tower of Primitives, which has exhibits of all the things prims can do. You can do more by making your own mesh objects, but that requires skill in Blender or Maya to make objects outside of Second Life.

Attention any Linden reading this: make sure the head of marketing and whomever is responsible for the new user experience reads this topic. There are two big new user problems, well known to anyone who's spent an hour at a new user entry point: 1) What do I do now? 2) How do I fix this #$%^ clothing problem? Address those and new user retention will improve.

I've written enough on this before. Once you accept in scripting that a region crossing is a process that takes time, not an atomic event, you can handle the minor problems involving animations and controls. The Firestorm preference Move and View -> Movement -> Stop when error gets too large deals with large bogus movement at crossings. Right now, my experience is that aggressive security orbs are more of a problem for flying than region crossings fails. I just flew the length of Satori, from GTFO HQ in Bruissac into Belessaria, with the little Duoquito helicopter. Shot down three times by security orbs or no-object-entry parcels. No hard fails at region crossings. On the other hand, I can seldom fly the F-16A Fighting Falcon for more than 5 minutes without a hard fail.

Good question. I'd really like to see the southeast corner filled more. It looks awful. There are land edges with roads that just end in midair. U2-81, U2-82, U2-83, and U2-84, especially.

And if you turn off texture animation, I found, it snaps back to the original repeats/offsets/rotations. OK, now I've got the semantics of how those interact. Thanks.

There's quite a bit of reasonably nice abandoned land near the southern tip of Satori. Check out the land near the new railroad lines.

Amazon River, the jungle roleplay, enforces this with an experience and an attachment. If you're not wearing the HUD, they eject you. Wearing the HUD, you can't fly, you can't cam (blocking objects appear in front of your camera and you get threatening messages), you can't teleport to anywhere within the experience area, and if you are underwater for too long, you drown. It's a good anti-cheat system.

See "Gangsta Bat" on Marketplace for a freebie. Wear, mouselook at target, click. That will get the message across.

Is there a video of that?

Oh, I see, it's just an upload convenience. (So many special cases, so little time.)

Normals, too? Well, OK. If the model has normals and there are also texture nomals, how are they combined? Vector add and renormalize, or something fancier? Think of something like a sign scrolling around a cylinder. You want to keep the cylinder's normals but scroll the color. The normal layer and color layer seem to be aligned there.

Objects in SL have a color layer, a specular layer, and a normal layer. Each of those has an individual scale, rotation, and offset. Is there any good reason those scales, rotations, and offsets should be different for different layers of the same face. Can anyone find me an object in world where that's done for a useful reason? Which of those layers does texture animation affect? Just color, color and specular, or color, specular, and normals? (Looking at some rendering stuff which would prefer only one texture transform per face.)

Yes. Refreshing enough times tends to get the forums back. This is the kind of error web sites show when they have a load balancer with several web servers behind it, one or more of the web servers is down, and the load balancer hasn't detected this and cut the dead server out.