animats

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.

It's an attractive idea technically, but has most of the same problems as distributed social networks, which have tiny numbers of users. (This is a technical subject of limited interest to SL users, so I won't go on with it here.) "Portals" between different virtual worlds, though - that might be practical. In the early days of SL, LL was more open to that idea. I've seen a video of a Minecraft to Roblox portal demo. This idea seems to be getting traction.

Not that anyone can detect. Some of the newer graphics Lindens who show up at Creator User Group have promise, but they're too junior. No public statement from Ebbe Altberg, the new owners, or the new chairman of the board indicates a future direction. SL's technical people, overwhelmed by the technical debt of all that ancient C++ code, concluded that SL could not be changed much, and top management believed that. Hence, Sansar. Which failed. Now they're stuck. The technical debt problem is real, but the existence of third party viewers and Open Simulator shows that it can be overcome. Oz LInden has retired. A replacement has not yet been hired. Here's the job opening for a VP of Engineering. Much will depend on whom they get. Tasks listed for the new VP: Own and manage the architectural roadmap; setting the vision and strategy for technology, and distilling it into successfully releasing the product on time Anticipate technology scale and capability challenges and communicate clear, proactive plans to address these challenges. Reasonable. The listed job requirements, though, focus on the wrong technical things. Experience with successfully building large-scale, global internet technologies in AWS They need someone who's been in the game industry or VR to move forward. Preferably someone who's been inside a big MMO. (Yes, MMOs are games, but underneath, a big modern MMO and SL have many of the same issues.) Someone who understands AWS plumbing is needed, but that's not the VP's job.

There are several cases. Object entry is turned off, the visible ban line case.This isn't so bad. All the ban line does is turn physics off for the vehicle. You can use the Edit menu to back the vehicle out and turn physics back on. The root of the vehicle has to hit the ban line before the root of any avatar on board hits. My bikes do this automatically. That workaround is not too helpful for aircraft, because you're stopped in midair and aimed into the ban line. Object entry is turned on, but avatar entry is prohibited.This is bad. The vehicle gets in fine, and the avatar is torn off the vehicle. This is a cause of aircraft stuck in the sky. No way to fix this from a script. Aggressive security orbs. Can't recover from those.

Daytime mainland, default, around 10 AM, in Langdale. Too dark for daytime. Almost like a partial solar eclipse - hard shadows, but dark. There's a bench in front of the coast guard station, and you can't see it. Daytime mainland, same time, ambient illumination boosted to boosted to 90. Better. Now you can see the bench, and the shadows are still visible. This is a leftover problem from EEP. By mistake, the default mainland EEP settings were set too dim. Unfortunately, LL didn't implement a tool to go back and change them in bulk. So mainland has been too dim since EEP. That still needs to be fixed. It's a minor change; just boost "ambient a bit. If you use "personal lighting" to override this, you stop the day cycle for yourself and basically turn off EEP.

Also "crypto" and "NFT". I'm surprised that one of the virtual land real estate investment trusts hasn't become an SL landowner yet. Yes, such things exist. Search for "metaverse REIT". But those guys are a sideshow. The serious players are Epic and Roblox, who have tens of millions of users, billions of dollars, a track record of making big 3D worlds work, and say they're building the Metaverse. There's interest in portals between metaverses again. SL used to be into that, but backed off. A gateway from Roblox to SL, for users 16 and over, has potential.

Yes. My perspective is that I've been in Silicon Valley for years, have been around various startups, some successful, some bankrupt, and I've seen what happens when a company gets Left Behind.

Some new news from Roblox. A friend pointed me at their Q1 earnings call. Roblox, of course, is that little blocks world where they're struggling to get the median user age above 13. That 42 billion dollar little blocks world with over 33 million daily average users. Now they're moving beyond blocky avatars. Roblox CEO: "And so our vision is everything from cartoon characters to classic Roblox blocky avatars, to ultimately AAA avatars that we see around a wide range of immersive 3D experience. What we're building internally is technologies that allow combinatorial excellence, and it includes a system where any piece of clothing works on any avatar. And also where ultimately, motion integrates with this system as well, including both captured motion as well as you can see with our acquisition of Loom.ai, a vision for ultimately including your own motion to drive the face of your avatar." "Ultimately, our whole avatar system, including clothing, body, face, hair, animation, is 100% [user generated content] supported by our creator community. You're going to see over the next year, more and more developments along this." Both of those features are possible for SL. Not easy, but possible. I've discussed how in other posts. Roblox is now moving into higher age groups. SL territory. Only 14% of Roblox users are over 25. That's 4.5 million daily average users in SL's demographic space. SL has only about half a million, if that. LL, you have to keep up. There's a real competitor coming.

Yes. I recently ARd a "sandy beach" which extended so far into Linden water that even small boats couldn't get through. (That was unusually inept landscaping. A thin horizontal object with a bad physics model in the middle of an inland waterway. Even the amphibious Hydro-Hauler, which can usually grind its way over almost anything short of a vertical cliff, could not get past that mess.) Yes. There's a standard way to mark restricted waters. This is it.: A keep out buoy in RL. This one warns boaters away from the water intakes of Hoover Dam. Good reason for a keep out area. A keep out buoy in SL. For one prim, you can warn unwanted visitors away. Available on Marketplace from various sellers, or make one yourself. Please, if you have ban lines in waterways, mark them.

If you let scripts open floaters, let them close them, too. In fact, that should apply to all popups. Currently, where the listen for a dialog goes away, the floater stays on screen, all buttons dead, until dismissed.

Yes. Turn on the operating system's graph of network traffic, and then teleport to a region you haven't visited recently. There's lots of traffic for about 10 seconds, and then it slows way down, even though there's more content to be delivered. Something in the asset delivery chain is throttling. Hard to tell what.

Yes. I've made the remark before that throttling at Akamai may be the problem. Akamai's content delivery network is intended to be used for web pages. SL assets are retrieved from those servers as if going to a new region was browsing to a web page with a few thousand images. Akamai may treat that as an overload and throttle bandwidth to the viewer. Akamai says they throttle "intelligently", which probably means if the access pattern doesn't look like a web browser, it gets throttled. I brought this up at Server User Group once, and the LL people hadn't thought about that. I personally have 1Gb/s networking, and still get 30 second texture loading stalls. There's one thing that seems to work particularly badly - signs. You can walk right up to a sign, then wait, and wait, and wait for the text to load at high detail. Vendors, too. Whatever prioritizes this does not understand that when a texture is filling most of the screen it really ought to be loaded promptly.

I was reading an article about the Memphis style pervading online advertising. Now LL's decision makes sense. Default hipster website. This is the Memphis style. Note similarity. It's currently perceived by marketing people as the safe approach. It's so blah it doesn't turn anybody off. It could be worse. Facebook Horizon is an entire virtual world in that style. Facebook went for maximum safety on that project. That's the virtual world where the avatars have no body below the waist, so as to avoid any possibility of sex.

Whatever happened with the "Project Interesting" viewer from 2013? This was supposed to load nearby visible objects first, avoid holes in roads, and such. Yet we still have the common experience of standing in front of a sign and waiting a full minute for the high-rez version to come in.

Oh, nice! A good public surf beach. Post a link, please. And someone should get that into the destinations guide. The Miami sim used to have a good surfing beach, but that closed down.

Read "The Ballad of Lost C'mell", by Cordwainer Smith.

I just encountered a one-day old bot in Boardroom sim. No visible body, no movement, a mid-level chatterbot would answer. The conversation: [Moderator Edit: Chat Logs Removed] Anyone recognize that bot?