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animats

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Everything posted by animats

  1. animats
    Yes. A key feature of Bakes on Mesh is that you get to set the order of layers. The user interface for that is kind of hard to find, but it works.
  2. animats
    The main protection is setting autoreturn time. I leave some of my parcels open for rezzing and object entry, but autoreturn time is 20 minutes, so people can park vehicles. With autoreturn set, griefing will clean up automatically. If your parcel has roadway or a parking lot, please don't turn off object entry. Anyone who gets out of their vehicle to shop will lose their vehicle.
  3. animats
    There are alternatives to AWS. You can rent space in a data center and install your own hardware, which is what LL used to do. You can lease a bare server with hardware support and install your own software. (I have one of those for a non-SL project.) That's more common today than owning the hardware, because the data center keeps a stock of spare machines and will replace them as necessary. Plus there are lots of other options for web-oriented servers that aren't relevant here. In general, leasing bare servers is the most cost-effective alternative. But to get good rates, you have to lease for at least a year, so capacity planning becomes important. With AWS, you can scale up or down as needed. We know that towards the end, servers were not being added, because LL announced you could not buy new regions until cloud uplift. Now you can't buy SL new regions online because the "land store" is apparently not yet integrated with the AWS system for adding more capacity. AWS lets you add more servers in seconds. The land store has to talk to the AWS ordering system properly for that to work. LL support is doing that manually for now.
  4. animats
    I told Oz that was going to happen a year ago. He insisted it wasn't. AWS is not usually cost-effective when you have compute-bound dedicated servers running 24/7. AWS is cost-effective for loads that vary with time of day and season, because you can acquire and release resources, paying only for what you're using. But SL sim servers run busily even when no one is in a region.
  5. animats
    In the Amazon sims, you can drown.
  6. animats
    This came up once at Creator User Group. I think Vir Linden mentioned it. Boats can't keep water out, and so boats tend to be awash with water inside the hull. Or they ride too high in the water, to avoid that.
  7. animats
    You can order new regions from LL. Contact support. The automated ordering system has been broken for months. (You know they're understaffed when the order-taking system that generates substantial revenue is down for months.)
  8. animats
    You can buy regions directly from Linden Lab. But the automated system for doing this has been broken for months. Contact support.
  9. animats
    The female default isn't that bad. The male default is often '70s Disco Guy With Radio. Starting at the Firestorm gateway is a good user experience. There's usually someone on duty. New Resident Island has a walkthrough tutorial that gets you a Ruth or Roth mesh avatar, the open source avatars. You also get some clothing basics. Then they have a shopping area where there are some free items and some items for sale from the designers who contributed the freebies. Ruth and Roth sort of fit classic avatar clothing, but not quite. Too much fussing, tweaking, and alpha layer creation is required. The White Dove has something similar, but their mesh avatars are mostly off-brands for which there is little clothing available. Ideally, new users would start with a mesh avatar and some fitmesh that Just Works.
  10. animats
    Ask in the Drivers of SL group. People there collect many vehicles.
  11. animats
    From that article: "The real estate world looks towards a landlord-led model, where large property owners lead the charge, buying up the Metaverse and letting consumers wander around listlessly." Ouch. Parts of SL are so like that.
  12. animats
    Meli Imako has full perm hair for animesh, along with some other minor items. Shoes in SL tend to have huge triangle counts and will push the LI of your animesh way up. I got Duck Girl to make me a nice pair of low-poly sneakers and a hoodie as custom jobs. But that's all I have in mesh animesh wardrobe. There's not that much clothing available for animesh. I just had a few items made to show it was possible. I was hoping that some already in the SL clothing biz would pick up on that and offer low-poly versions of their items. But nobody did. If anybody wants to produce low-LI animesh versions of their rigged mesh clothing, please get in touch with me. I'd like to give my NPCs a bigger wardrobe. From left to right, Mesh hoodie and shoes by Duck Girl, hair by Meli Imako, and a holiday hat from Marketplace. 50 LI total, much of which is the hat. Texture clothing pants. Dress from Marketplace. 48 LI. The dress is no good for animesh; it blanks out at about 25 meters due to poor lower LODs. Texture clothing only, except for the shoes. 33 LI. The kid is from Marketplace, and is probably a minor character from some game. 24 LI. The clothing is built into the character base and cannot be changed in world.
  13. animats
    I don't think so. Although you can create HTTP servers from inside SL, there's no easy way to find them. There's no SL DNS server that lets you name them. They don't have persistent IP addresses. SL doesn't use IPv6 yet, so there isn't enough address space for that. This is to some extent intentional. A general web server in LSL is a terrible idea. It's a load on sim resources better spent on in-world tasks.
  14. animats
    It's a classic problem in game balance design. It's easy to botch. Dual Universe just botched it. Dual Universe is a huge MMO, with multiple planets. It allows building, but you have to mine resources first. However, you can write programs and automate some of that. Luca Grabacr, who's well known in SL, went over there and went to work, streaming her progress on Youtube. She started out going around and mining rocks, like everybody else. Soon she had a base, and some ships. After three months, she was up to "Fur Admiral Luca", with three huge spacegoing aircraft carriers loaded with small craft, a base, an large automated mining plant, manufacturing facilities, and a large temple. Then Dual Universe changed the rules. People were building too much. The users are angry. That didn't end well.
  15. animats
    From one of the articles linked above: "The gulf in prices between a Second Life kitten (about $3.25) and a Nyan Cat NFT (around $600,000) raises the question of which kind of temperament in the NFT market will outlive the other. It’s difficult to say if the crazier valuations will persist into the near future—just as it’s difficult to say, for instance, what the value of bitcoin will be a year from now. The action feels too new and too superheated to extrapolate." Yes. Think of NFT's as gatchas that cost serious money, like enough for a car or even a house. Last month's big Make Money Fast NFT concept, "Top Shot", which involved highlights clips from NBA games, had a price crash this month. The NFT thing may be over already. Over at Upland, for which Tilia provides financial services, we see this: "Our property to USD partnership with Tilia Inc. (the creators of Second Life), which allows Uplanders to sell their properties for U.S. dollars, is now live for a select group of 100 beta testers. All Uplanders will be able to enjoy this feature once the beta is complete, expected in QX. In the future, Uplanders will be able to sell other virtual items, such as NFT art work and cars, for real money." Now we know where LL management attention is focused. Over at Linden Lab jobs, we can see who's being hired. Zero technical people for SL, but they need two more payments lawyers for Tilia.
  16. animats
    Not really. There's a huge amount of abandoned land in SL, and even more land owned by landlords but not rented out. Areas near roads and water can be rented, but interior land not connected to anything has near zero value. Look at what's not selling on the auctions.
  17. animats
    There's growing interest in creating artificially rare digital objects. Gacha do that, of course. But it's getting bigger. Look up "non-fungible tokens". These are tradeable digital things with traceable ownership. Uses a blockchain. Some are artworks, some are purely symbolic, like the "property deeds" to real places that Upland sells, using Tilia as a payment system. It's a way to monetize Fear Of Missing Out. Also, non-fungible tokens are really a way to avoid regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Decentraland and Sominum Space use those extensively. The effect is that all the action involves trading land, and few people do anything in those virtual worlds. As a result, they're boring to visit. If anything, SL already has too much of that. All those big landlords sitting on huge amounts of vacant land, trying to keep the price up. Which reminds me, I need to AR some new floating, rotating, FOR SALE signs. Recently one of the smaller land barons bought some lots near me from a larger land baron, but their tenants all moved out.
  18. animats
    Yes, there are two of those in-world. Somebody thought that was a clever joke once, but it's outlived its time and reduces the value of land beyond the bridge.
  19. animats
    The new owners of LL may think that Tilia will give them a strong position in the exciting new make-money-fast world of non-fungible tokens. That's the business which Upland, which is powered by Tilia, is in. Non-fungible tokens are a scheme for monetizing Fear Of Missing Out. See Upland's home page. Depending on how old you are, you may remember Crypto Kitties, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, the Franklin Mint, or baseball cards. Same concept; crank out "collectables" in "limited editions" and convince people to overpay for them. A lot like gachas, but at far higher prices.
  20. animats
    The fear of censorship is so high that we have this. Movie is not meant for kids. May include discussions of advanced topics in computer graphics.
  21. animats
    I ran into a new user in SL recently who wanted to make a co-working space where people working on projects outside of SL could work together. I'm in Silicon Valley, where such places exist in real life. (Or did; I miss Hacker Dojo and TechShop.) So I showed him a co-working space someone else had built. But no one goes there. I explained how you could subdivide a parcel and have local talk zones so people could use voice chat within their zone without bothering anybody, or go to another area, or the common area, and chat. I showed him a few office spaces in SL, including the SYZM Tower and my own workshop. But he never built anything. I was disappointed. It's a reasonable idea during the epidemic. Something someone in the SL landlord business might consider. Has anyone ever built a successful one that gets used?
  22. animats
    Yes. If you're going to use up land for a parking lot, may as well make it usable. One of my back-burner ideas was a security orb for parking lots. You'd place a prim under the parking lot to mark its boundaries for the orb, then allow rezzing and object entry. The security orb would greet anybody who parked (arrived attached to a vehicle and unsat) and tell them how much time they could park. Or allow them to park longer as long as the avatar stayed nearby. "Free parking while shopping here". Shortly before time ran out, they'd get an IM, telling them their time was running out, please return to your vehicle. When time ran out, the vehicle would be returned. That would maximize parking convenience while preventing object littering.
  23. animats

    Faces Per Object

    animats replied to GManB's topic in Mesh

    8 faces per prim. More per linkset.
  24. animats
    Misc. road-related pet peeves: A few places in Heterocera, there's a sharp transition between a horizontal road and a hill. More than 18 degrees all at once and your vehicle will bounce off as if it hit a wall. Especially the long railing-less bridge southeast of the central island. Except for that one bridge, there are very few roads in SL with that problem. Some cars can't handle those at all. Stores with parking lots that won't let you park. Ones where object entry is turned off. If you park and leave your vehicle, your vehicle is immediately returned to Lost+Found. Ouch. Set your parking lots to object entry allowed, at least 30 minutes autoreturn, please. Unlit roadside stores. Some people don't realize that their place is too dark to shop for users set to the standard EEP setting and with ALM and shadows on. Store owners, please put in lighting, both inside and outside. Check by setting the time to midnight and turning on shadows. SL can look gorgeous at night when lit properly. There's sort of a tradition that gas stations have rez zones. Please keep that going.
  25. animats
    Popular teleport destinations should have one of those platforms that moves you slightly off the landing point in a random direction. There's an anti-pattern to that. I know one place which sends you two notecards and a landmark immediately on arrival. By the time you've dealt with all the popups, someone has landed on top of you.
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