animats

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.

There's a problem with bots piling up at info hubs. When their home sim is restarted, some of the bots try to log in again, but their home sim is down. So they get sent to an info hub, because that's what happens when your home location is down. Many of them don't have enough programmed intelligence to get back where they belong without human assistance. I've seen bot avatars forced through walls by the pressure of the pileup. Maybe info hubs should have some kind of security orb to eject avatars stuck there, maybe after a few IMs ("Hi, are you a stuck bot? If not, move around a bit, or answer this popup, so we can tell you're alive. Otherwise we'll eject you in an hour. Thanks.") Private property owners plagued by unwanted bots can eject them. It's mostly a problem for un-monitored info hubs.

Gaeta, the Unfinished Continent, says one of the wiki entries. I'd like to see the southeast corner of Zindra finished off, too. It has land and roads ending in mid-air. Another neglected continent is Sharp. This used to be the Teen Grid. It has a perfectly good city, Hyperion, but isn't used or visited much.

On a related note, I'm testing some rendering stuff, and would like a few simple non-avatar, non clothing objects with good normal maps for test purposes. Something like a table or chair, not too complicated. I have some simple objects like bricks and corrugated metal, and need something slightly more complex. Marketplace links are fine. I'd prefer the objects be mod. Also, some things that use specular maps usefully. Thanks.

Yes. SL's character animation is way behind. The SL architecture doesn't really know much about avatars. To the sim servers, an avatar is just a cylindrical object. There's a minor gimmick to tell the viewer the ground angle, to allow feet to adapt to the ground, but that's about it. Viewer side, the viewer has no collision detection. So clothing goes through clothing and body parts. Hands and legs go through furniture. Animations are canned movement files that run blind, unaware what's around them. Fixing this would require a total redesign. And a much higher minimum hardware requirement. Enough collision detection to stop limb movements when they hit something, though... Worth thinking about. And a clothing system where, when you change clothes, some physics runs and makes sure the outside stuff is on the outside. Meanwhile, you can watch Epic's Unreal Engine 5 demo. Someday, open virtual worlds will be this good. Probably around 2025. Epic's next-generation animation system. We can dream, can't we?

Ah. Some hints. Land ownership rights in SL are very strong. As a result, this place is mostly self-governed through land ownership. There's a Linden Lab "governance" team to enforce rules, but it's quite small. Building a wall around your land is allowed, but your neighbors may not like it. If you can, build something that fits well with your surroundings. This is a shared world, and it looks better if we cooperate. If you want total isolation, there are some areas where everybody has a walled, isolated parcel. If you build a waterfall, and there's no place the water can come from, it looks fake. Waterfalls need hills or mountains. Spend some time looking at good builds created through cooperation. Bay City.The Confederation of Democratic Simulators. New Babbage.

I've been able to go from the west coast of Bellessaria to Satori by boat. Once reaching Satori, though, you can't go very far by water. The Baby Pelican, in Yeeowler. This is as far as you can go northward by water. Nice place to stop. Leeward Cruising Club location. Water rez zone alongside the dock. Many ban lines in area.

I still wonder about the people who are so paranoid. Most of my own land is open-rez, 20 minute autoreturn. Very little trouble. There was someone who tried to rez a house in my parking lot, and I told them where they could find a big Linden sandbox and rez large objects. At a few GTFO hubs, my NPCs, wearing "GTFO Hub Loss Prevention" T-shirts, approach new visitors and say hello. They give the impression someone is watching, which is enough to reduce griefing. I've been tempted to make an NPC in the form of a grumpy old man with a cane who approaches strangers and yells "Get off my lawn". But I don't want to have to deal with the customers who would buy such a product.

Firestorm will run under Wine 3.0 on Linux. Under Wine 6.0, it crashes on teleports. So it's not inherently impossible to run SL in a somewhat virtualized environment.

Lindall Kidd used to give a weekly course on land in Second Life, but she's taking a break. What you get with premium membership is a "tier payment" for 1024 m^2 of land. That's a monthly charge for owning land, and pays for the servers that keep SL land running. You still have to buy the land. Real estate in SL varies over a huge price range. Waterfront land, land near roads, and land in nice areas is more expensive. Isolated land in ugly terrain is really cheap. Low-value land is often auctioned off cheap. There's even "abandoned land", owned by no one, which you can request from Linden Lab through a support request. They charge you $1/m^2. The Second Life map in the viewer has a checkbox that turns on the "for sale" overlay, and then you can see all the parcels that are for sale. Here's some land at different price points. Abandoned land. L$1/square meter. This is in the interior of Corsica. For people who like isolated, bleak spots, or plan to build something very large. Beachfront property in an adult area. L$12 / square meter. On the east coast of Zindra. Small parcel on the main street of Bay City. L$312/square meter! Only includes the bare land, not the building and furnishings. There are also arrangements where you're renting land from a landlord but contribute your tier credit towards the group's land fees. Some privately run themed areas use that. The usual advice is to spend some time in SL before buying land, to see what you want. Look around first.

Setting your own environment does not fix the problem. Then, places which have good custom environments, such as New Babbage, are overridden. Is there a JIRA entry for this bug? It's been brought up at Server User Group, acknowledged by the Lindens, but stuck because someone needs to code a tool to change mainland region defaults globally.