animats

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?

SL is rather aloof from the gamer ecosystem. They're not on Steam. They're banned from Twitch. Their people don't go to the Game Developers Conference. This cuts them off from new users and new technology.

That really needs an automated purge. At least one object UUID from the marketplace upload should be found within the parcel of the "see item inworld" location. Run a batch job to do that. Then send a message to each merchant where the object can't be found. 30 days of no-find, and the "see item inworld" link blanks out.

(Deleted, someone just mentioned Horizons).

London City comes close.

There's a good Nolo Press book on this. Harley-Davidison is known for being very aggressive in enforcing their intellectual property rights. Over 10% of their revenue, and probably a higher fraction of their profits, comes from non-bike merchandise. Using their logo is totally out; that's a clear trademark violation. Harley has trademarked the sound of their bikes, and that's been litigated against Honda, although both sides eventually gave up arguing over that. On the other hand, there are lots of big bikes that look similar to something Harley has made. You can't copyright a working part, which is why there are third-party auto parts. There are design patents, but they have a short life. This whole area is really complicated.

I've been trying MetaHuman Creator. It lets me generate variants on the stock human models, but I can't do much with them. Exporting to Maya is supposed to work, but doesn't. Sent in a bug report. There's a licensing restriction on the Early Access version - for now, you have to render in-game with Unreal Engine to use it for free. It's really, really slow. It's running mostly on some server farm, takes several minutes to start, and about 15 minutes to generate a character once the settings are set. Making changes takes about 10 seconds. It requires a current generation graphics card to use all the features, but you don't have to turn on real time ray tracing. Runs in the browser. Complains that Firefox is not a supported browser but runs fine. This is on Linux; it also is supported on Windows 10 and MacOS. Highest LOD (0 of 0..7, smaller numbers are higher detail) You can zoom in on the eyes and all the detail is there. LOD 5 (of 0..7) Just to see what a lower LOD is like. Below LOD 2, the hair drops to a simplified system. No vertex counts; I haven't been able to download anything useful yet. However, published numbers are in the ranges we see for SL avatars. Don't yet know how compatible the assets will be with SL. The body bones are about the same, but I'm not sure about facial structure. Anyway, that gives you an idea of what the latest generation of tools looks like.

More Metaverse stuff: Blizzard is making Metaverse noises. Nothing specific, though. Epic has raised a billion dollars to do something "metaverse". Seeking Alpha says Roblox is currently the most likely to make the Metaverse happen. New York Times coverage of Tim Sweeney talking about the Metaverse in the Apple trial. There's a huge amount of money headed towards Second Life's comfortable niche. Billions of dollars.

This is quite do-able. See https://github.com/John-Nagle/l*****ils/blob/master/motorcycle/rotatewheel.lsl for what I use. That goes in the wheel, and it gets messages to turn it on and off. You don't need to do it that way. Don't update too often. If the velocity isn't changing much, don't change the omega value. PRIM_OMEGA has parameters [ PRIM_OMEGA, vector axis, float spinrate, float gain ]. You have the spin rate inside the axis of rotation, and TWO_PI in the spin rate. The spin rate has to go in the spinrate parameter, and the axis has to be the same as the axis of the wheel. It's useful to skip the updates when the wheel speed isn't changing by much. If the new velocity is within 5-10% of the old velocity, don't bother doing an update. Less jitter. If the spin rate is near 0, set it to exactly 0, so the viewer knows to do a full stop. Very small omega values don't work well. 10 radians/second is a useful limit on rotation speed; above that the frame rate interacts with the rotation rate to cause ugly strobing. That should get your wheels turning properly.

Epic's Metahuman Creator is now out, in pre-release form. "MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-based app that empowers anyone to create photorealistic digital humans, fully rigged and complete with hair and clothing, in minutes." You can apply for a free account. I'm in the queue. This tool is browser-based. The heavy work is being done on Epic's server farm. The output is a file that can be read into Unreal Engine or Maya. So it ought to be possible to get these characters into Second Life, with enough work. Unreal uses a different skeleton than SL does, but it's close enough to the bento skeleton that translation should be possible. Not easy, but possible. Here's a technical overview. The system has automatic LOD generation, with up to 8 levels of detail. Vertex counts are tolerable by SL standards. Highest, for face closeups. is around 150,000, and lowest is around 125. You can also take selfie videos with an iPhone and use them to generate facial animations. Probably the biggest incompatibility is that UE4 has a real hair system, something SL lacks. So the "grooming" assets Metahuman Creator creates may not be usable.. Rendering this in SL properly needs a PBR renderer with subsurface scattering to make the skin look right. Some of the younger graphics Lindens seem to be interested in making that happen. Game characters are about to climb out of the Uncanny Valley.

I have a workshop and store in Kama City, and a house in Bellessaria. That's all I can really use.

We're all in Zindra, having fun.

I've been toying with the idea that during teleports, you see the map, and it zooms way out, then zooms in on your destination. Give the user a sense of where they are in the world. Like what Google Earth does.

I have a swim HUD which, late last year, started getting HTTP errors. It's apparently phoning home to a defunct server. Nothing about what it does requires phoning home.

Probably not very well. If you go to Hippotropolis, you'll see one of my NPCs running around the hilly terrain. Sometimes she briefly sinks below the terrain by half a meter or so, because the navmesh has lower resolution than the terrain and doesn't track the hilltops accurately.

There is some suspicion that was at least in part a wash sale, and that buyer and seller were working together to push the price up. The buyer is definitely trying to push the price of NFTs up. I wonder if NFTs will come to Second Life. I hope not. There is a virtual land real estate investment trust, and it supports Upland, but not Second Life.

I have heard (I think from Simon Linden) that actually stopping a script with llSetScriptState takes it out of the path that uses time on each simulation frame. Scripts just waiting for an event do use time, and somewhere around 5000 to 6000 idle scripts in a sim, use all the simulation time. You can test this in an empty sandbox.

Pathfinding will work on non-ground objects. Walkable objects must be a linkset covering more than 10m x 10m or pathfinding will not work, even though it will show in the navmesh display. Pathfinding does not work well above creeping speed. Pathfinding plans which way to move, starts objects in that direction, and checks back later to make course corrections. At higher speed, there's too much distance covered between course corrections, and pathfinding objects hit things. For a slow snake, it could work.

That's a good idea. If you do this, rez it before you need it (say when someone draws their weapon) as invisible, and of course, phantom. Rezzing can be slow, but setting position and orientation is fast. Then trigger a texture animation to show the motion, non-looped. The animation should start and end transparent, so all the beam action is done by the texture animation. Also trigger your "zap" sound at that time. All those operations are fast ones. When you get this going, please post a location in world where we can see it. SL is not a great platform for shooters, but with effort, it's possible to do something good.

Hangars Liquides, the abandoned 5-sim cyberpunk city from years ago, seems to have some activity. All the rentals are full, the factions board has some roleplay info, it's been reworked for EEP, and some signs have changed. Good seeing it alive again.

What you're showing looks like a traceroute from some home on Road Runner to some server in Russia, with zero Linden Lab or Amazon involvement.

One approach would simply to have have animesh avatars. Animesh are basically modern mesh avatars, minus the legacy stuff. Animesh have a skeleton, which can be full bento, and a skin. (Some of my animesh NPCs are full bento.) To that you can link rigged mesh clothes. You can also create a new texture for the skin, with legacy-type clothing painted on. There's no legacy avatar underneath to be hidden, no onion layers, etc. Animesh have less excess baggage. What animesh don't have is a connection to the Bakes on Mesh server or to the Wear Clothing system. Nor do they have attach points. They're not hooked into the clothing user interface. There was supposed to be an Animesh Phase 2, where that would be added, but that was never implemented. Yes! New Resident Island has a good tutorial on modern avatars, and you get a free Ruth or Roth. There's not much clothing that fits Ruth and Roth very well, but there is some. I'd argue for an introductory tutorial along the lines of the one at NRI, where you get one good bento mesh BOM avatar and about a half dozen good rigged mesh outfits. New users should be told that's how avatars work now. Tell them there are some old legacy avatars around that older users still use, and they still work, but are obsolete. Here's a way to improve the new user experience. Put New User Clothing areas adjacent to new user hubs, where you can see the starter avatars on pose stands and the clothing collections that go with them. Avatar makers should be allowed to have stores there, with a portal to their main store. The price of having a store there is providing a free starter avatar kit for new users, with an avatar and some basic items of clothing. Each new user gets to look at the samples and gets one free starter kit. Competition for market share will encourage creators to participate.

I don't think there are any. There are various police departments in SL. I've seen someone in a police car driving Route 8 in Satori and dealing with accidents. At one time, you could dial 911 on any Gentek Telecom phone in SL and be connected to a dispatch center, which would connect you with the appropriate roleplay emergency center (police, fire, SL coast guard) and help move the roleplay along. Sadly, that service is no longer available. The lights are out, and no one is there to answer.