animats

I have a script in each wheel which manages its rotation, depending on the velocity in the local frame. But you don't have to. speed is how fast you're going. > 0 is forward. rate is how fast the wheel should turn at that speed. vector vehdir = <1.0,0.0,0.0>*llGetRootRotation(); // global direction of vehicle float speed = vehdir*llGetVel(); // speed in fwd direction // Convert to wheel rotation rate in radians/sec float rate = speed / (WheelDiameter*PI); You need to put in a WheelDiameter of your own. Useful hints: On each update cycle, send a new omega to the wheel only if it's changed by 10% or more, or it's stopped. Otherwise you send too many updates to the viewer and the changes may not look good. Limit rate to 10 or so. Turning faster than that, it doesn't look good given the frame rates SL can achieve. Check for near 0 and set to 0 rate. Slowly turning wheels while stopped look silly. The problem of rotating both the front forks and the wheel is left as an exercise for the student.

Because every script that's just sitting there doing nothing adds about 0.003ms/frame to the script load. This is "expected behavior", per https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-227405. If you have 5000-6000 scripts in a sim, doing nothing, all the script time is used up. I've tested this in empty sims. It's tough to fix; someone would have to dig way down into the low-level scheduler for scripts and redesign it so it had separate ready and non-ready queues. Probably about a third to half of all SL CPU time goes down the drain that way.

I have friends with a ranch in Northern California. Each summer for the last few years, either they've had to evacuate their horses to somewhere else, or take in horses evacuated from elsewhere.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Policy_Regarding_Inworld_Banks SL used to have banks, in-world ATMs, and interest-bearing loans. Then some of the users running "banks" disappeared. Current policy is that one can only run a bank in SL if you are licensed to run a bank in RL. Selling things on credit, though, is probably not prohibited. Anyone can extend credit; you're risking your own money, not someone else's. You could offer a rent-to-own plan for objects, where, once all the payments have been made, ownership transfers. Or a "first 30 days of rental free" plan for new users. It's like Animal Crossing, where you arrive and immediately go into debt to Tom Nook to get a house. Selling new users good avatars on credit might be a good business. If you don't pay, you turn back into a default.

To fix this, a new Linden water sim is needed north of Togota and west of Tiger. Then the water area gets its own water height. Also, that would let you sail along that cost. Right now, you can't; there's no boatable water at that corner.

Now that's interesting. It's an LL mainland land design error. Waterfall between Momo and Togata. Those water levels are different on purpose. Togota: water height 20m. Moma: water height 35m. Tiger: water height 20m. Off-world water west of Tiger and north of Togata, and northwest of Moma: each sim uses its own water height. This has to have existed for a long time. It must have been noticed, especially since there's a Linden lighthouse right at the corner, positioned to view this.

Kelly Shergood has an aviation map of SL, at http://shergoodaviation.com/radar.php that shows hostile security orbs her customers have reported. But it uses the main SL map tiles, which are currently broken.

I've seen drops in sim frame rate, but nothing like that. My main location in world, in Vallone, has 5 of my NPCs running around, all using keyframe motion. Plus there are four escalators, also using keyframe motion. Sim FPS is holding steady at 44.9 FPS according to the statistics bar in the viewer. Script usage is at 69%, which doesn't change much if I shut down all of my stuff. I have a little device called "Sim Lag Reporter", which checks for delays in sim script responsiveness of more than 200ms. I turned that on, and it's not reporting any problems. What region is in trouble?

I just flew across most of Sansara, and everything went well until, flying at 350m over the Snowlands, I was shot down by someone's zero-delay, no warning message security orb.

The Second Life viewer does contain a web browser. It's Google Chromium, the open-source version of Chrome. It works mostly like Chrome, except that it doesn't have the non-open-source part needed to play video with strong digital rights management. This is why you can't watch Netflix on a TV in Second Life.

Have you seen Waterbank News? That's a fake newspaper about fake events in SL. They even have quotes for fake stocks. They need reporters.

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.