animats

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.

Ted Turner, who created CNN and Turner Network Television, once said "The great thing about television is that it's so passive". ABC-TV had a trade promotion in Beverly Hills in 2003 with banners reading "All we ask is 5 hours a day".

Drayke Newall has some good points. A big question is, "OK, we've got the Metaverse, what do we do in there?" SL has some areas where it ought to be strong, but isn't. You can have meetings in Second Life, but they're not great. What would it take to make them attractive and useful to more people? Now that too many people have had to deal with Zoom, can SL offer more? Education in Second Life was tried, and it failed. Is there a role there? Trade shows and conventions are possible but don't work all that well. Collaborative work within Second Life is possible, but rare. There's a demand for this. People have had college graduations in Roblox and business meetings in Red Dead Redemption. There were once college graduations in Second Life, but that was a long time ago. What are the pain points to doing this in Second Life? We here probably know.

Yes. Which is unnecessary, since lists are immutable. It discourages programming where lists are passed through several functions.

Today's new "Metaverse" player: "HiDef." "The company is making a “genre-defining game” for the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. The goal is to make interactive experiences that transcend traditional gaming boundaries and demographics." So who's behind this? An NBA basketball player, TV producer, and motivational speaker. A "Chief Impact Officer" who was "associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement" and an advisor to Lady Gaga. The former head of Warner Interactive Entertainment. Building the thing is apparently outsourced to Protagonist Games in San Diego. You wouldn't expect those thought leaders to do any actual work, would you? There is, at least, no mention of "blockchain". Too many people are suddenly entering this business. We're seeing a flood of bad virtual worlds.

Talk to the SL Cheerleaders. They do something very similar. Christi Charon has a choreography system to help get everyone synchronized.

Sims aren't that bad for a modern GPU. Fixed objects have LODs. Avatars, though...

Some of the roleplay sims have newsletters.

Now that's interesting. I'd thought you'd only see that at the edge of the world. But Sutherland is nowhere near the edge.

Is this perhaps a homestead or open space region? Those have much lower script time limits.

You can't, because you're just renting the house. You can't modify it. Suburbia rarely has auto-opening doors. The whole point of Bellessaria is to replicate a bland suburbia.

Save the last value you set. If the new value is within 10% of the old, and is not zero, don't change the speed of the wheel.