animats

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the Amazon sims, you can drown.

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.

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.)

You can buy regions directly from Linden Lab. But the automated system for doing this has been broken for months. Contact support.

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.

Ask in the Drivers of SL group. People there collect many vehicles.

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.

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.

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.

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.