animats

It helps to approach scripted motion in SL like robotics. You issue a command to the actuators, something roughly similar to what you asked for happens, and then you issue corrections. You don't control the world, but you can influence it.

Keyframe motion starts from where you are and is all relative, so you need to get your position and compute keyframes to get where you're going. Store the points you want to go through, and when you want to start moving, pick a nearby waypoint point and make your first keyframe take you there. Note that there's some error in your final position. You have to recalculate the next move based on where you end up. My NPCs do this, as do Yava Pods, Delaunay Industries freight lifters, and the trains at Janet's Viking sim, Folkvang. It's non-trivial to code but works quite well if done properly.

Can support get your inventory copied to the beta grid, or is that broken, too?

Set the number of avatars not drawn as impostors to 3 or 4 and that happens. That slider really should be tied to the main graphics complexity slider, because few people know about it.

VR seems to be a niche. It's fun for a while, but not for long. I've tried both VR headsets and the Microsoft HoloLens AR system. A big problem with VR is that about 5 to 10% of the population gets nauseated when the visual world and the real world are moving independently. Even among people who can tolerate it, it's kind of wearing. That's why Beat Saber, where you stand in one place and slash at oncoming targets, is the most successful VR game. 2019 was supposed to be the "year of VR", and it wasn't. VR didn't even pick up much during the pandemic. I agree. It's quite possible to get the frame rate up with a better viewer architecture. Making the system more responsive is tougher, but there's already been some progress server side. The bottlenecks are known. The basic architecture isn't that bad. SL needs to come up to a level of performance on a gamer PC that would not get it laughed off Steam. That's tough, but not impossible. Getting up to that level would open up new markets. A bit of encouraging news: LL is trying to hire a replacement for Oz Linden. And a technical project manager for Second Life.

Those Roblox graphics are very nice. (If you want to see the car video, start it here and skip the annoying long-winded intro. It's better with sound off.) You can make SL look that good, but not that responsive.

There's a lot of room for growth in the current architecture, but not in the current code.

I'm testing something and need some test sculpt maps. Cube, sphere, other simple forms. "A pack of sculpture maps was available for download at http://www.jhurliman.org/download/sculpt-tests.zip but isn't anymore." says the wiki. Does anyone have those? Thanks.

I know. I've written about that in onboarding topics. A few days ago I was at Firestorm Help Island, which had no staff at the time. Someone was wandering around looking lost. I talked to them for five minutes, and just told them a few basics - everything is made by the users, the world has no built-in goal but there are places within it that do, you can get better clothing cheaply and even better stuff if you pay, the world is run by land owners who set the rules for their own land, and talk to people for a while before asking them to friend you. Less confused, he went off to do some things off the help island. It doesn't take that much to get new users started.

Right. The main feature of "non-fungible tokens", like Upland's "deeds", is that they are neither a security nor a commodity. So they are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Their legal status, so far, is that of a collectable, like Beanie Babies. That's why they are replacing Initial Coin Offerings as the latest Make Money Fast scheme. The SEC pretty much shot down the Initial Coin Offering With Nothing Backing It Up market, simply by sending out letters along the line of "please tell us why you didn't register your new public security offering with us". Suddenly most of the new ICOs decided to shut down. The NFT market may implode before it gets going. There was a lot of press about Beeple getting US$69 million for a collection of rather bad art. Then it turned out there was some connection between buyer and seller, and it now seems unlikely that $67 million really changed hands.

Look on Second Life Marketplace for Complete Avatar / Demon. Some of those come close. You can ask the creators to make a custom version. Or buy a stock avatar and accessorize. Sample demon from Marketplace. Search for "Complete Avatar / Demon" to find this and others like it. Back spikes. This is an attachment to a separate avatar. You can definitely get all the parts, but getting them to fit together and look good may be tough. Look for things that have a demo version or an in-world store, so you can try, or at least see, before you buy.

Firestorm does that, too. You have to. Decompressing SL's JPEG 2000 images is really slow. You can only do 4-10 per second per CPU.

There's the privacy checkbox, "Avatars on other parcels can see and chat with avatars on this parcel". If that's on, some additional restrictions could apply: Can't cam into the parcel from outside. Can't sit on anything to which you don't have an unobstructed line of sight from avatar to seat. Then if you closed and locked your doors, no one could get in. This would reduce the need for ban lines.

There's a large amount of "metaverse" activity right now, and most of it involves insanely overpriced "land" in virtual worlds with a "blockchain". Atari has started a casino in Decentraland. MegaCryptoPolis has opened a 3D world where land can cost as much as US$181,000 per parcel, and you must have a crypto wallet to visit. Storefronts start at US$91,600. The Make Money Fast crowd is taking over the virtual world industry. The worlds they are creating are crappy. Few people actually go there; they just trade tokens. This is discouraging. I just hope that the new owners of Linden Lab don't try to go in this direction. It won't end well.

If it's a desktop, you may be able to upgrade the power supply. Depends on the computer in which it is installed. It's a routine job any shop which fixes PCs should be able to handle.

See the LL policy on alts. "Your first basic account is free, and so are a few alternate accounts. However, if you create an army of alts, Linden Lab may charge a small fee of US$9.95 for the creation of each additional basic account as a way to recoup some of the cost. ... Currently, you can create: Up to five accounts per household. No more than two accounts in a single 24-hour period." Also see Second Life "bot" policy. You can have alts and bots, but there are limits and rules. LL hasn't been doing much enforcement in recent years. Maybe that's changing. Sometimes bots pile up at info hubs when their usual region is restarted, because the bot controller is not smart enough to get them back to their usual station. I've seen an infohub so packed with bots that some were forced through a wall by the physics engine. Filed a ticket on that to get some cleanup done.

See this discussion about the NVidia 670. Known problem.

I have Roth, the open source avatar. Can wear classic clothing, both BOM and mesh. More or less. Expect to have to adjust. Roth is really Ruth with a flat chest. So ankles are too small, arms are too thin, and thighs are too big for a man. Clothing can hide this.

Graphics driver problem? If you are not running Firestorm in full screen mode, does the entire screen go blank, or just Firestorm's window?

A few points. First, by "crash" do you mean "disconnected", or "program terminated with a crash". True crashes in Firestorm are very rare. The developers do a good job. About two years ago, I got one that was repeatable. So I built the viewer from source, ran it under a debugger, got a stack backtrace, and submitted a bug report. It's fixed now. Second, the "packet loss" rate reported by the viewer includes not just packets lost by the network, but packets dropped by the viewer because it was too busy to process them. Go to a sim where your frame rate drops, and watch your packet loss rate go up. You may just need to turn down your graphics settings. Third, if you're actually getting program crashes, it may be a memory problem on your computer. I had that once, and had to run a memory diagnostic for hours to catch it. Replaced the RAM, no more crashes. I recommend running "The Valley" as a test for your computer. The Valley is a graphics benchmark from Epic designed to fully exercise the GPU, CPU, and memory. It shows a nice valley with trees that you can explore. It looks like a game, and it's built with Unreal Engine 4 like an AAA title, but nothing ever happens; it's just a nice landscape to look at. Left to itself, it gives you a tour. If The Valley will run for an hour, your hardware should be able to run Second Life without problems.

Beq Janus explained part of the problem at Server User Group. The trouble is that group messages are not "reliable" at the SL network level, which means they do not get re-transmitted if lost due to viewer overload or network lossage. So, to compensate, after the viewer receives a group message, it asks for all the group messages available. This gets it the recent messages plus duplicates of old ones. This in turn creates a huge load on both server and viewer with a group with a lot of message history sends a message. That's why. It probably made sense in the early days of SL. They were thinking of a few people organizing a raid, not 10,000 users of a popular body getting an product promotion. Worse, this goes through the sim servers, which means there's back-end traffic between sims and some message server to get messages to where you are in world. Group messages really ought to be handled by a server independent of the sim servers, because group messages have no locality. They have nothing to do with the 3D world. (Local chat does; who can hear you depends on where you are.) Gradually, SL has moved non-world-oriented things off the sim servers - first assets, then inventory. It's time to see that done for group chat. SL is a social network. The messaging has to work.

Nice!

Yes. A good example for new users is the pair of new walk-through tutorials at New Resident Island. There's a male and a female path, and you're guided through getting and wearing the Roth and Ruth open source avatars. At the end, there's some free clothing that fits those avatars.

SL needs something that allows new users to get small amounts of L$ by spending time, to get them used to the system. Requiring payment info for that is counterproductive. It's widely recognized that SL has a tough onboarding experience. Adding more obstacles does not help. Now, having a setup where you get 2x as much reward if you provide payment info - that might work.

There's something for that on a beach at Firestorm Help Island.