animats

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.

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?