animats

Search for "logo generator" on the web. There are programs which do this automatically. Not great art, but OK.

For those into the business end of the metaverse, there's a conference coming up, the "Real Time Conference", April 26-28. Online, free. Search for the title. This is more about collaborative work than entertainment, although the usual suspects, including Epic and Disney, are presenting. Also, the NVidia people are going to talk about the roadmap for Vulkan and beyond. Creators and some Lindens might want to attend. It's good to be aware of what's going on outside. (SL ought to be able to support collaborative work. A few months back I ran into a new user who wanted to set up a co-working space in SL. I took him to some office-type spaces in SL, and we talked about how you could do things such as set up an open office where voice didn't carry from one section to another. He didn't actually do anything with his plan, though.)

That's about what I have, plus 1Gb/sec Internet in both directions. Running Linux, though. With everything turned on, I get about 30 FPS in my home sim. Hint: with a graphics card like that, go to the Hardware Settings menu in Firestorm and set the texture memory slider all the way up to 4096. That's still only half of what the card has. That can double the frame rate in texture-heavy areas. With all the rendering info. This is the employee break area out back of my workshop.

If you really need a privacy barrier, there are trees for that. There are some very low prim tree sets around. There's even one which is completely opaque, but just looks like dense forest and shrubbery. Take a look at how the Moles separate parcels in Belessaria.

That sounds like Sanctuary. It's a huge, beautiful multi-sim roleplay area, still on line and visitable. But roleplay there stopped several years ago. There are a few bots still running. The Sanctuary website is live, but empty. I'm not sure what the story is there, or why it sits unused.

I suspect we will see more brand enforcement activity in this area as the "non-fungible token" crowd gets more branded "rares" sold in virtual world. Vogue Business reports that Gucci is getting into having a presence in games. Until recently, there was no money in it. So many brands didn't care. Also, there was a court decision in Europe that Ducati's trademarks for real-world bikes did not extend to video games. Ducati then came out with their own racing game, so they could hold a trademark in that category. Nike now has their shoes in Fortnite. You have to have a product in a category to have a trademark in that category. Someone might pitch to Gucci's and Chanel's legal departments that they should have a few items in SL stores. That meets the "use in commerce" requirement, so they can then add the computer entertainment trademark category to their trademark. Copyright is a separate issue.

It irks me that Linden Lab is generating fake rare items to raise revenue. Historically, Linden Lab hasn't done that. Users could make no-copy items, but, other than Linden Bears and some items from new user quests, LL rarely did. It's kind of sleazy. It's the sort of thing the "non-fungible token" scammers do.

Thanks for doing that.

I went over there in a little Larson Logistics Hydro-Hauler amphibian. I started at GTFO HQ in Bruissac, went down the seaplane elevator to the water, boated to Sirens Isle, drove up on the beach, and looked at the big boats. 17 avatars in the sim, most apparently AFK. Kind of dull; usually someone says hi if you go there. Drove back into the water, boated back to GTFO HQ, up the seaplane elevator, up the ramp to road level, and off by road to the GTFO hub in De Campion, where a GTFO Hub Loss Protection NPC greeted me. Siren's Isle does have a lot of big yachts, many with poor low level of detail models so they disappear at distance. That irks me. You want to be able to see boats before you get close, so you can change course. (If you buy something large, look at it with Firestorm with the LOD factor in the Firestorm bottom menu turned down to 0. That shows you the world at lowest LOD. Don't buy large things which disappear in that mode. It's OK if a teapot drops out of view at distance. It's not OK if a mega-yacht drops out.) Some avatars with complexity above 100,000. While not wearing much. The sims and viewers all seemed to be handling this fine.

Yes, it does. The trouble is that group chat is handled as an in-world feature, going through the sim servers. That's a legacy of early SL, where the sim servers did everything. But it has nothing to do with where you are in world. It should be something where the viewer connects directly to some chat server, which handles IMs and group chats independently of where you are in world. The current system needs to coordinate between the chat server, the sims, and the presence server, so that messages can be passed to the correct sim for delivery. This adds much unnecessary complexity and traffic, plus problems such as losing messages during teleports. Open source, scaleable general purpose chat servers are widely available. The viewers need to be modified to talk to them. They need to authenticate through the SL authentication system so you can't spoof user names. Messages sent from new viewers could be sent on both the old and new systems and un-duplicated on receipt during the transition period. The legacy sim code doesn't need to be modified at all, until it's obsolete and can be removed. Firestorm could probably do this on their own, if LL didn't object.

I'd expect that to happen. An animation uses some resources and has a fixed time delay. That alone will result in sync. I see this all the time, because I have some animesh side by side on pose stands, in different outfits, all running the same animation list. The animation switching is sim-side, so there's a common resource conflict that makes them fall into sync. It's a known annoying problem in computing. It usually comes up with things that poll. If the polling works by having a delay between the end of one poll and the beginning of the next, and replies to a poll have some variance based on delay, all the pollers will synch up. One of the early workers in networking, who was at LLNL and a physicist by training, first saw this. The way you stop this is by timing from before you start the event, not after. That way, how long the event takes doesn't force a drift into sync. I once built up some oscillators on a solderless breadboard to experiment with this. If close to the same frequency, they'd sync up just because they drew power from the same power supply.

All 16 users must be very upset.

Running the animations uses some CPU time, probably. It takes very little coupling to make oscillators synchronize. Watch them synchronize. Pay attention to the one in the right column, second row.

There's no need to guess about how close the US is to herd immunity. The CDC measures it. Blood samples taken by commercial labs for other purposes. are randomly sampled for coronavirus antibodies. If someone has either had the disease or has been vaccinated, there will be antibodies. There's data for each state. This runs about 6 weeks behind, so right now the data is for mid-February. Watch those numbers. When they reach 80-90%, it's over.

There may be a market in this sort of thing. So far the successes involve monetizing some existing popular brand, such as NBA players or soccer teams or musicians or Marvel Overextended Universe characters. Upland is trying to do this without such a connection. “I think that 99% of the projects that are in the space today might not exist two or three years later, very similar to the ICO ("Initial Coin Offering") boom” - CNBC article. (Correction: the "leader board" I mentioned above is not for all of Upland. It's by someone who has a system in Upland to build traffic by paying for visits. Like those coin things in SL.)

I made a trip by air from my place on the west coast of Bellessaria to GTFO HQ in Bruissac. Almost made it in one flight, until I was shot down by a zero-second security orb near Angels Airports. That was a long flight in a little Duoquito helicopter. Southern Satori seems to be an especially bad place for security orbs. You can tell it's a bad area of mainland when you see lots of parcels with big walls around them. Just like in RL. As I've said before, if you want that kind of isolation, get a parcel from one of those landlords who operates a non-continent of little isolated squares. LL should offer a land swap deal, where you can swap your walled or sky-domed parcel for a parcel of the same size and shape on a non-continent. Then you can be alone, walled off from the world, without others having to deal with your obstacles. That would help clean up mainland without much cost to LL.

Well, the Upland/Tilia people have made their big move: Trading cards! New! Upland Collectables Powered, somehow, by Linden Lab's Tilia. You can buy and sell these using a crypto coin called UPX. Upland FAQ: Is UPX, the internal token, a cryptocurrency? When can I withdraw it? Technically speaking, UPX is a fungible token on the EOS blockchain, similar to any cryptocurrency. We have elected, however, to use UPX strictly as a utility token. This means it can only be used inside Upland and cannot be withdrawn. By doing so, we avoid UPX being traded on external or decentralized exchanges outside of our control and possibly being deemed a financial security by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC). Maintaining compliance with United States regulations is one of our top priorities. However, as the platform does include a real economy, we have elected to partner with the financial division of Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) to allow a new feature, coming soon, called “fiat out”. Using this feature, you can choose to sell your virtual properties and items for either UPX OR fiat (e.g. USD). You can currently buy UPX (1000 UPX for US$1), but through Paypal, not Tilia. Tilia talks about Upland, and Upland talks about Tilia, and the deal was announced 10 months ago, but as far as I can tell, there's no functioning money transfer system. Upland's main product is a trading game. Imagine playing Monopoly on Google Maps. Here's a gameplay video, in German, on Twitch. Can't find an English one. They also have a retirement community for CryptoKiddies on a virtual Angel Island. Upland has a usage statistics page, which I think was put together by a user. According to that, the most active Upland user has about US$5 in the system, and has visited 209 times. Anyway, that, as far as I can tell, is what Tilia is doing, besides, of course, handling SL payments. If anyone from Tilia would like to clarify, please do so. The overall impression I get from reading the Upland and Tilia materials on this is somewhat confused. Am I missing something?

Bellessaria and some of the private estates prohibit too-fast security orbs.

Lindall Kidd owns an apartment building in SL. It's a tall building with a lot of space around it, because you need to do that to get enough prim capacity.

The code following that "return" will never be executed.

Some years ago, I went to a talk at Stanford by one of the early architects of Facebook. Facebook, remember, started as a system for college students. Their original infrastructure had servers dedicated to individual campuses and regions, on the assumption that most traffic would be local. The servers could talk to other distant servers, but were not intended to do that much. As Facebook grew beyond college campuses, the traffic pattern changed. Traffic wasn't as local, and the inter-server links became clogged. Fixing that would require a complete redesign of their infrastructure. They did it.

That HUD is accessing a server outside SL. From the message, either the server is down, or connections to it are blocked by something. Anyone know the URL for the external server?

Much will depend on who LL hires as a VP of engineering. If they get someone with a track record and reputation in the game industry, things could get interesting. I'm not seeing their job posting on LinkedIn, Gamasutra, or GameDev. Linden Lab has historically not been part of the game industry. They don't send people to GDC, for example. Now that big MMOs have a lot in common with SL, it's reasonable to look in the game industry for talent.

OK. Please pass the better items up to higher management. Like Chin Rey's post above. Some of us are trying to make SL better here. We'd like to see more action from LL in that direction. Thanks.

Open Simulator can archive an entire region to a file, but Second Life cannot do that. It's an intellectual property issue. There was a full-sized model of Versailles once, from some organization in France, but they couldn't keep up the tier payments for such a huge project. So it's gone. You should be able to save your parcel to a file, with all the objects you've created and the placement of everything in the parcel. If you loaded such a file, you'd get everything in the file, plus anything with UUIDs matching your inventory. Everything else would come back as a cube of the right size and location, with a link to Marketplace if one could be found from the original UUID. That would be within the IP rules of SL.