animats

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.

Once Ethereum converts to Proof of Stake the cost of "mining" will disappear. That was scheduled for January 2020. It still doesn't work. Think of NFT's as no-copy items that can be be moved between grids. That could be made to work in Open Simulator. If a grid supported an NFT system, it would check against the blockchain to make sure you own the object and it's currently assigned to that grid before letting you rez it in world. You could even do this from inside an object, in LSL, without grid support, by having the object connect to a blockchain node and checking the blockchain entry for that item. If it's not yours, it deletes itself. Assets for Open Simulator could be stored on Arweave instead of just grid-specific servers. Arweave is a distributed file store. You pay once, about US$10/GB, and store forever, with a complicated crypto coin scheme to keep it funded. All this is technically possible, even if not that great an idea. This doesn't make copybotting impossible, but it makes it possible to identify original uniques. It's all about artificial scarcity. If you like gachas and spend money on them, you might like this. If you want to actually do stuff in a virtual world, not so much. There are about a dozen blockchain-based "metaverses" right now, and they're all awful as worlds to visit. Some, like Upland, don't even bother building a 3D world; they're just a map on which you can stick things. The NFT thing is in the process of collapsing. At least one of the highly publicized transactions for an expensive NFT art object turned out to be a wash sale between cooperating parties. The only people really making money are those who can mass-produce name brand collectables. Sports teams and celebrities, basically. I hope LL doesn't try to get into this. They're so slow moving that the fad will be over by the time they get their version running.

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Can you buy a region from LL yet without manual intervention from support? If not, that's probably why. Buying a region has to be integrated with AWS provisioning. When a user orders a region, Linden Lab has to rent another server from Amazon Web Services, load it up, and link it into the grid. That's all automated on the Amazon side, but probably not, yet, on the LL side. If that isn't working yet, selling a sim is labor intensive.

On the same surface? You can adjust the friction of a surface. If you turn it up high, things will not slide, and if you set it to a low value, they will. Go to a sandbox, rez a cube, make it road width and long, and tilt it a bit. Experiment with driving on that. Change the friction value for the cube and see what happens.

I'll have to try. Beq Janus has been working on the Firestorm decimator and she may have fixed some of the situations in which the output disappears.

Uploading linked parts is an absolute disaster in the uploader. The link number is random. Really random. Different from upload to upload of the same .DAE file. I looked at the uploader code once. Links are sorted by internal pointer address, so the current state of memory allocation affects the link order on upload. There isn't link order info in the .dae file. Sorting the links alphabetically is possible, allowing some control. There's a lot that could be done to improve uploading if a viewer left behind some of the LL limitations. The limitation that all materials and face numbers must appear in all LODs could be overcome. The sim side limit is that you can't have more than 8 materials per object over all LODs. The file format allows missing faces and materials at each LOD, but the uploader is more restrictive than it needs to be. (You can test this by creating an object with, say, 8 materials, and then letting the built-in mesh reducer reduce it down to four triangles for the lowest LOD. You now have a model with "No geometry" entries in some of the 8 face slots.) A TPV viewer that did that would differ from LL viewer semantics, of course, and LL doesn't like that.

If SL had face tracking via webcam, so your avatar followed your facial expressions, would you use that?

That is interesting. Forget the survey, show us some successful education in Second Life.

They don't have to. They have 350 million registered Fortnite users. Maximum concurrent logins were 15.3 million on December 2, 2020. All they have to do is offer a new product to their customer base,

That's available in SL. Search for "Vacuum system" on marketplace. There's a whole genre of anime about virtual worlds worse than real life. Currently running: "Kyuukyoku Shinka *****a Full Dive RPG ga Genjitsu yori mo Kusoge Dattara". There are more competitors each month. Just put "metaverse" into a search engine. With Epic Games (valuation US$17 billion) having just raised a billion dollars for their metaverse, and Roblox (US$46 billion IPO) getting into the area , we should see some competent competition. The "blockchain" crowd has yet to produce anything good.

At present we are: Investing in our infrastructure to further improve speed and cadence of updates. Overhauling the onboarding experience for the newest Residents. UI cleanup. Developing new marketing initiatives and entertainment partnerships to fuel growth. Preparing for SL18B Less glamorous but no less crucial is our ongoing and growing work to ensure compliance with multiple regulatory requirements. Well, at least we're hearing some management goals from LL, for the first time in a long time. Let's all check back in 3 months to see how LL does on this.

A concurrent user count well below 100 happened to it. High Fidelity belongs to the class of "game level loaders". Someone creates a level offline, uploads it, and then others can visit. Each level is totally isolated, and there's a long loading delay as the next level loads. It's not a single world like SL. Basically, it's a download system for simple indy games. Sansar and Sinespace are other examples of that category. Interest in those is very low. Concurrent user counts are around 20. If your game was any good, you'd put it on Steam, so this is kind of a bottom-feeder business. Fortnite Creative Mode, which is somewhat similar, is a modest success, but it's a tiny fraction of the Fortnite empire.

And fill the hole east of Harriot, where four roads go right off the edge of the world. This is lame. Somebody didn't finish their job. Perhaps the worst world edge in SL.

There's no one in charge of SL right now. Oz Linden, VP of Engineering for SL, has not been replaced. So nothing is being redesigned, just patched. Since this problem requires a partial redesign, it's not getting done. Here's the job ad for Oz's replacement. Much will depend on whom LL hires. If LL gets someone who's been in charge of a big, successful MMO, we might see SL get better.The going rate for someone good enough to pull SL out of the hole is above US$250K/year. We'll know when they hire someone. Engineering VPs don't come out of nowhere. If it's someone with an impressive public track record, there's hope. If nobody has ever heard of them, well ... While operating remote-only, it's hard to do new things. Work tends to be driven by the JIRA ticket system. So work has to be cut up into bite-sized chunks so that the remote team can digest it. This doesn't work well for redesign tasks.

This throws a lot of new users. The two big new user questions are "What do I do now", and "How do I fix this clothing problem". (Second Life has a clothing system that can do almost anything but is very complicated.) Arriving in Second Life is like moving to a new city. The city is indifferent to you. Unlike MMO games, Second Life itself won't make you do anything. It won't even suggest anything. There's a lot you can do, but you have to find it. It's a big world, too, the size of a major city. Almost entirely built by the users. The purpose of an area depends on what the users of that area set it up for. Second Life itself doesn't care. Much of Second Life, like a real city, is just random buildings. You can wander around for a long time, passing castles, houses, and gas stations, and feel totally lost. In the viewer menus, there's a "content" section and a destination guide. Those give some hints of places you might want to visit. There's a "new user" section of the destination guide, which can help you get started. What's available? Roleplay. Fantasy, SF, cyberpunk, western, medieval, steampunk, supernatural - there are areas for all of those. Search in the Content search. Tourism. Hundreds of places to visit. Fighting. SL can do first-person shooters, and there are areas for that, although it's not really a good system for combat. Driving. Lots of roads, lots of vehicles. Flying. Lots of planes, including helicopters so accurate you need real flight training. Boating. Boats are popular, and many people sail. There are marinas and competitions. Creating things. You can build things in Second Life. Almost everything you see was built by a user. You can practice building in "sandboxes". Hanging out and talking to people. Easy, and popular. London City is a good place to start and usually busy. Many places are only busy during events. Events. There are lots of events going on, and a content guide in the event tab. DJs are a thing. Then there's stuff that costs money. Your own land. You can buy land. You can rent land. You can get a house, furnished or unfurnished. You can build on land. It costs. Spend some time in SL before getting into this. Shopping. Hundreds of thousands of things to buy. There's an web based marketplace, and stores in-world. This costs, but usually not much. You're buying from other users, not Second Life itself. Making and selling things. This is hard, and takes serious 3D design skills, because, unlike MMOs, the tools are not dumbed down to make them easy. That's enough to get you started.

This is only of interest to people doing third party viewers. When connecting to the login server, the HTTP header of the XMLRPC request must contain a header item "Content-Type", "text/xml" or an HTTP error 400 is returned. But the more modern form "Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8" will not work. Using that also produces an HTTP error 400. Took two days to find this.

The Drivers of SL group did that today. I was shot down at 400m altitude by a no-warning, no message, send-home security orb while over Belessaria. So were others. ARs have been filed.

LSL uses, I think, UTF-16. That reflects when it was designed, back in the day when Java and Windows also used UTF-16. So a character's numeric value is between 0 and 65535. This includes most living languages and the common symbols, but does not include emoji.