animats

"Insufficient land resources" means you need more available prim allowance on your parcel. You only have 18 available. You may need to delete some objects to free up some prim allowance. 32 free prims are enough for most vehicles, but 18 is low.

It's possible to do quite a bit in world, especially if an experience is involved. With an experience you get a key/value store and can store more data. If you need a real database, you need a server outside of SL. Low-end shared hosting, for a few dollars a month, is often good enough. A big problem with in-world servers is that you can code them, but others can't find them. They don't have persistent IP addresses. There's no DNS server that lets you give them a name so they can be found. In theory, someone could try hooking up SL to DynDNS, so your in-world server could have a findable name. But servers within SL have so little capacity that it's barely worth it. Despite this, not only are there servers in SL, there are in-world data centers. Some manage large collections of CasperVend items. Items have to be delivered from inventory in some prim somewhere. So somewhere, there has to be a prim to do that job. It can look like anything. Some look like safes. Some look like rackmount servers. "Skill gaming regions" often have a data center hidden away somewhere.

If you want to limit view distance, the right way to do it is via "fog", or atmospheric effects, rather than looking off into blankness. Hiding distant objects, right. Many games do this. It's exaggerated here. A little fog helps, because the distant impostors can be lower rez. Hiding distant objects, wrong.

You can put both a image and media on a prim on the same face of a prim. So you can have an image with instructions on how to turn on media.

This is one case of a general issue in Second Life - different forms of motion control are not interlocked. For example, keyframe motion (via llSetKeyframedMotion) and position setting (via llSetPos, etc.) interfere. You need to completely shut down one kind of motion and allow some time before starting another. The same is true of llTargetOmega, and of pathfinding. One control mode at a time. Come to a full stop and wait a second between changing control modes. Or, better, pick one control mode and stay with it.

The Process Credit page breaks if a Google tracker, "ids.cdnwidget.com", is blocked. Only that page seems to require that tracker. Some of these problems seem to come from a re-branding from "Tilia" to "Tilia Pay" and a move from "tilia-inc.com" to "tiliapay.com". LL now needs to fix some links.

Well, Tilia seems to have re-branded as "Tilia Pay". They have a shiny new web site at https://www.tiliapay.com/. But it's just a promotion for the business-to-business service. tilia-inc.com is now redirecting there. There's no customer support. They refer people back to Second Life. The "process credit" system no longer works. It just hangs, as shown above.

The Tilia site is still blank, and it's now after 10 AM on Monday. That's not good. When a financial services business, suddenly disappears from the Web, people become concerned about its financial soundness. I tried the "Process Credit" page. It hangs either at authentication or at the Know Your Customer check. Cannot withdraw funds from Second Life. Tilia is a regulated business. Their primary regulator is the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. (415) 263-8500.

Niagra Mohawk Power building, Syracuse, NY. The building, built in 1932, still exists. That sculpture is on the 7th floor, so you can't really see the detail from ground level in RL. Now that would look good in Second Life.

The Heterocera main line has a rez zone at most stations. The Bellessaria signal system should be able to tolerate rez zones on sidings, but not in the middle of the main line. So, sidings.

Yes. Each siding should be a rez zone.

So unambitious. Here's a list of ambitious things SL might add. Face tracking of facial expressions, used to animate bento avatars. Bento avatars are capable of elaborate facial expressions, but nobody uses this. That's why SL talking-head videos look so dead. All it takes is a webcam, some open source face tracking software, and an efficient data channel from the viewer to LSL. Not many people would use this routinely, but machima and Youtubers would, so it would be seen by many people. Zoom calls to and from SL. Talk to people over Zoom as your avatar. This would get SL more connected to RL. Joystick and gamepad support for vehicles. You can hook a joystick to SL, but all it does is work the arrow keys. When you teleport beyond the current sim, show the map, zoom out, then zoom into the new location, then the world appears. Google Earth and GTA V do this. It gives you a sense of where you are in the world, and how big it is. Infinite viewing distance. This can be done with region impostors. As with map tiles, take a picture of each non-isolated region. Take it from 8 directions, plus above. Use that to make big impostors of regions beyond draw range. At last, see the mountains of the Snowlands and the cliffs of Heterocera from the distance. See the far shore when sailing. Physically based rendering. It's time. All of these are quite possible technically. Once LL management realizes that Tilia is not going to become a big name in finance, maybe they will return to paying attention to their core product.

What's the exact text of the message? I looked for "impossible" in the Firestorm sources and didn't find it associated with login errors.

"The sign of a good society and a good government is not in what it builds, but in what it maintains." - Eric Hoffer.

It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired. -- Robert A. Heinlein. Good point, though. Roblox is exciting to kids but wearing on adults. Second Life is boring to kids but OK for adults. Entertainment in general has a far higher density of interesting events than most real life. At least 10x, maybe 100x. This is also true of video games. It's not as true of Second Life, which is a big world in which, most of the time, nothing interesting is happening in most of the world. There are people who want that. When Bellessaria came online, I posted "Oh, the banality". SL had created a giant planned unit development, the most boring form of American suburbia. There was a much bigger market for that than I expected. What Second Life isn't good at is creating environments with more action. Worth thinking about, to expand the user base. Go visit Cocoon in Second Life, and then watch the trailer for Cyberpunk 2077. Same theme. Compare and contrast.

It's an interesting problem. What should text chat look like? IPhone style? MMO style? The problem is getting chat in front of the user without using up too much screen space. SL has so much info to put on screen. One option might be phone-like chat with truncation, so you get something like iPhone style, but truncated: I have a lot to talk about today, and so I .... and you can mouse over it to see the full text. Or not. Systems which work that way tend to encourage short messages.

Yes. I use Firestorm includes extensively. My in-prim scripts just read "#include FILENAME". All the content is in files stored on Github. A nice feature of Firestorm includes is that un-called functions will not be included. So you can have a file of library functions that are included into many scripts. Anything not needed is not pulled in. I've had to divide things into multiple scripts to stay within the 64K limitation. My NPCs have 12 scripts sending messages back and forth in JSON. It's not fun. To me, the biggest annoyance about script memory limits is that the stack is included in the 64K limit. You don't have full control over how much stack space you use, because you have to use stack space for incoming messages before you know how big they are. That can cause unexpected stack/heap collisions. You can tell how much heap you're using and take appropriate action if you're getting low, but the stack problem means you have to allow a big safety margin.

It's an interesting idea. How do you keep creators from creating FAST MESH where the lower LODs are blanked out? I looked into mesh reduction algorithms once. The one SL uses is not very good, of course. There are better ones that would work for buildings and furniture. But really, most of the trouble comes from pushing way too hard on mesh reduction. Pushing the number of triangles into single digits seldom works. Also, there's a minimum below which there's no LI reduction, and it's around 25 triangles. So don't overdo. SL clothing, has special problems. SL clothing often has actual fabric thickness. There's an outside and an inside, and they join at the edges. Common mesh reduction algorithms are terrible on thin sheets. To visualize what goes wrong, imagine a sheet with a wrinkle or "dent" in it. Mesh reduction should remove the wrinkle. Most modern mesh reduction algorithms try to minimize the volume difference between the un-reduced and reduced forms. So, removing the wrinkle from the side where it goes inward generates a big volume error. So does removing the wrinkle from the outside. This leads mesh reduction to trim the edges of the fabric! You can try this in Blender. Make a cube, make it into a thin sheet, subdivide to about 10x10 squares, and edit the mesh by grabbing some central squares and pulling them out to make a "dent". Now apply Blender's mesh reduction tools. The result will be very strange. Mesh reduction for clothing needs to be done in something that knows that it's a thin sheet, and can work on the inside and outside simultaneously. Marvelous Designer?

SL did. Daily connected user peak went from around 35-40K to 45-55K.

Roblox is doing an initial public offering tomorrow. If you're interested, here's the final S-1 filing. "Growth at Roblox has been driven primarily by a significant investment in technology and two mutually reinforcing network effects: content and social. First, user-generated content, built by our community of developers and creators, powers our platform. As developers and creators build increasingly high-quality content, more users are attracted to our platform. The more users on our platform, the higher the engagement and the more attractive Roblox becomes to developers and creators. With more users, more Robux are spent on our platform, incentivizing developers and creators to design increasingly engaging content and encouraging new developers and creators to start building on our platform. Second, our platform is social. When users join, they typically play with friends. This inspires them to invite more friends, who in turn, invite their friends, driving organic growth. The more friends that each of our users has playing together on the platform, the more valuable and engaging the platform becomes. This drives more users to our platform through word of mouth from their existing friends on the platform." Second Life doesn't seem to be able to get that kind of network effect. Why? Daily active users, or DAUs, on Roblox grew 47% from 12.0 million DAUs in 2018 to 17.6 million in 2019 and grew 85%, to 32.6 million, in 2020. • Hours engaged on Roblox grew 45% from 9.4 billion in 2018 to 13.7 billion in 2019 and grew 124%, to 30.6 billion, in 2020. • Daily paying users on Roblox grew from approximately 125,000 in 2018 to approximately 184,000 in 2019, and approximately 490,000 in 2020. Second Life and Roblox are roughly the same age, but Roblox management kept their platform moving forward. In the last year, that really paid off.

The whole point of Fitmesh is that it either Just Works or it's no good. Because the user can't fix it with shape sliders. If the clothing cuts through the body, shape sliders won't help. This moves the fit problem from the user to the creator. So start out new users with a mesh avatar and a half dozen good fitmesh outfits that fit it. "Your new avatar uses the latest Second Life character technology. You can wear clothing labeled as "Fitmesh for █ █ █ █ █ avatars", and it should fit. You can also wear "texture" clothing; that's just a picture painted on your avatar's body, so it's for close-fitting clothing such as T-shirts and leggings. There are also older types of clothing available which may not fit your avatar. You can try those, but there is no guarantee they will fit. Just like real life."

It's definitely not taboo. If you have modify permissions on a vehicle, you can modify it. Lots of people do this. Some scripts identify the important parts by name. Those are tolerant of added accessories. But if you add something, you may have to do a "Reset Scripts" to get the scripts to go find all the working parts again. If you want motorcycle parts, there's Karyn's Chopper Parts. Look for the big box of free parts to the right of the front door. Also, there's a junkyard to the right of the main building. Just like real life, there's an aftermarket parts business in SL. All this stuff is user-created, so it may not work well together. So save a copy of good vehicles before modding.

Yes. I suspect we will see LL try to do something in the cryptocurrency/distributed finance/non-fungible-token/Make Money Fast space. That's what Upland does using Tilia. Think of these things as gachas that cost thousands of times what they cost in SL. This virtual chair sold for US$5000. It's a no-copy, no mod item which you can import into Decentraland, Somnium Space, or Minecraft. Not, as yet, into Second Life. A lot of what's going on in this space involves monetizing fandoms. One of the NBA team owners is into this. Tilia may try something along the line of "X is making billions in this space. All we have to do is become their payments provider and siphon 5% off the top."

A bit out of season, perhaps?

For that, you ban them and report them to LL.