animats

Yes, the renderer has real problems when even the close-range stuff won't fit in GPU memory. It's frantically trying to cope, but just doesn't have enough resources. Don't build stores with giant walls of vendors all visible from one point.

"I plan to sell unlimited copies of this project in the Second Life Marketplace. However, due to the complex nature of it, I would need both a builder/designer and a scripter in order for this project to be realized." Unless you have a lot of money in real-world terms and are good at project management, you probably have to learn to do some of the work yourself.

The Roblox plan for the Metaverse Roblox has been around for about as long as SL. It's taken a long time to get going. It was smaller than Second Life for years. Then it started to take off. At this moment, 1,803,974 players are connected to Roblox. The company is valued at US$29.5 billion and is about to go public. Roblox's CEO wants to build the Metaverse. Above is his list of what the Metaverse needs. Let's see how SL looks. Identity. You have a persistent identity in the world. SL definitely has that. Friends. Not just people in your MMO clan or party. SL has that. Immersive. SL kind of has that. Are you your avatar, or are you puppeteering your avatar? SL is ambiguous about that. Luca Grabacr points out that a few simple changes make SL more immersive. We don't need full VR. Low Friction. SL falls down here. The new user experience is too painful. That's been discussed before. Variety. SL has that, with a huge range of activities. Anywhere. Not being on mobile is a problem for SL. Economy. SL has a functioning economy, and the users and creators make this world go. Civility. An interesting point rarely brought up. SL does well on this. Without an army of moderators, too. The way private property works in SL leads to not needing too much moderation. SL works well enough that governance meetings are boring. It's like going to city council meetings. So Second Life checks off 6 of the 8 items. Interestingly, the two big problem areas are technical and fixable.

Of course, then it will be daytime and clear all the time, since you've bypassed local environments.

Amazon is getting into game streaming, via "Amazon Luna". Streaming SL should work fine. The problem is pricing. What you're doing is renting a gamer PC by the hour, with its video sent back to your device. It's a remote console setup; the server is running the normal viewer. So it's not a development-heavy problem. It's expensive. Services charge by the hour, or allow you a limited number of hours per month. NVidia GEforce Now charges US$50 per year. That's the "Founders" rate. It will probably go up. It's under-resourced; you can try to connect and be told it's busy. Paying users can stay logged in for up to 6 hours; then you go to the end of the line and wait for a slot to open up. Not clear how busy it is. There's a free tier, but it's always busy. SL ought to be on some streaming service. Nice way to get introduced to SL, you can come in from low-end machines, and regular users can graduate to a real viewer and save money.

In some MMOs, you have to take your avatar to a safe place such as your home before you log out, or your avatar can be killed. I know some users who do that; they take their avatar home, put them to bed, and remain logged in. It's kind of precious.

I'd like to be able to mark an object as tamper-evident. Buyers could modify it with the edit window, but making changes should raise flags such as "SCRIPTS MODIFIED", "LINKS MODIFIED", and "TEXTURES MODIFIED", etc. visible in the edit window. That voids the warranty and they get no support.

I wish. Firestorm and the LL viewer do almost everything in one thread. A few things are in other threads. JPEG 2000 decoding of textures is, for example. Voice and media on a prim are in separate processes. But all the drawing and networking and the user interface are all in the main thread. When that thread becomes CPU-bound, frame rate must drop. The way you'd do this in a new viewer would be to load all the active geometry and textures into the GPU and have a thread dedicated to keeping that refreshed as the point of view changed. Other threads would add, delete, and move active objects as the point of view and world changed. Then you could fully utilize a high-end gamer PC. The problem is GPU memory. If you have enough GPU capacity, this isn't too hard. If you're GPU-limited, the viewer would have to reduce the draw distance (preferably automatically) and take other measures to cram enough scene into the available memory. In other words, on machines with Intel HD on-chip graphics and 4GB of RAM, which is where many older low-end laptops are, this is going to suck. On a gamer PC with an NVidia 1060 or better, it would be great. Even a current WalMart low-end EVOO laptop would be adequate. It's supporting older low-end machines that's the problem. About 20% of SL users have computers that can't even run Vulkan, which will run on almost anything reasonable newer than 5 years old.

If we could get subsurface scattering into skin rendering, that would be a big help. Skin looks either dead or too glossy. Bakes on Mesh makes this harder. You don't have a "skin layer" in the viewer. You have a merged layer of skin and some clothing. So it's hard to do this from viewer side without more help from the assets. Without BOM, you could identify the skin layer and give it special treatment.

With how many CPUs? SL viewers normally use 100% of one CPU, plus a little bit of time on a second CPU for image decompression and such.

Better shaders, developed by users, looks to be the next big thing. Modding games to improve the visual quality is a big thing. Roblox and GTA V have been improved substantially by users. Of course, you need a serious gamer GPU to get all the nice shiny stuff.

You can ask LL for a full sim, at the standard rates, by contacting Support. They just haven't automated the process yet since moving to Amazon Web Services. There's no shortage of servers now that they're reselling AWS.

I had to do much LSL list updating in my NPCs. I found that up to 128 integers, updating a list, which is actually a recopy, is roughly constant time. Beyond that length, it gets much slower as list length increases. If you're doing a lot of list updating, benchmark. It's not obvious how fast list updates go.

New Resident Island has something like that. There are walkthrough tutorials that get you Ruth or Roth, the open-source avatars, and tell you how to use them. Then there's a freebie area where you can get more clothing. The trouble is, there's not much really good clothing for Ruth and Roth. And Roth isn't that well-proportioned an avatar; it's really a Ruth with a flattened chest. (Ankles and shoulders are female sized, regardless of slider settings.) What's really needed are starter avatars that come with about a dozen outfits that Just Work, and stores where users can buy more. Preferably fitmesh. Fitmesh is harder for the creator and easier for the user; either it fits or it doesn't. If it doesn't fit, the body sliders will not help the user make it fit. Mesh avatar with fitmesh clothing is SL's best clothing system, but it's not the dominant one. A fitmesh-only fashion event might be a way to kickstart this.

Soon, we'll be able to trade Lindens for crypto assets in Upland via Tilia.

Yes. With EEP, the world is too dark. When EEP was installed, the default settings for mainland were set too dark by mistake. But no system was provided to change the default settings mainland-wide. Since this happened while "cloud uplift" was still being finished, it didn't get fixed. Now it's stuck behind the map being broken, group messages being broken, etc. You can make your own view of the world brighter using Environment->Personal Lighting. Turn up "Ambient" a bit. Or "Gamma", just a little. Or just set the time to "Midday". But changing that will freeze the sun in place and you will no longer have a day-night cycle. And the viewer will stop responding to places with their own unique lighting, such as New Babbage, which is always rather foggy by design. EEP is clever, but like too many Second Life features, work was abandoned at 80% complete.

As a means of exploring the world, that bangs things around too much. A phantom object doesn't get collision events, so that doesn't help. There are "llVolumeDetect" objects, but they only report collisions with physical objects, which includes avatars. Can't detect walls that way. Rapidly moving an invisible physical object around as an object detector will hit and push around avatars and vehicles. In a totally controlled environment, where every fixed obstacle was marked as a static obstacle in the navmesh, you could use llVolumeDetect objects to detect avatars and physical objects. But that means a large amount of parcel prepping. It also won't detect above-ground obstacles like low clearances. There's no easy way to do this with SL's current API. It's possible to do it via llCastRay, but it takes a lot of programming.

I used to do a lot of building in RL, before TechShop tanked. It really works.

It's surprisingly difficult to find out if a space is empty. It takes quite a few llCastRay calls. My NPCs do horizontal ray casts ahead to check for obstacles. This is done at several heights and widths. I do 9 of those, at head height, waist height, and ankle height, times center, left, and right. But that's not enough. I had to add vertical ray casts, to detect thin horizontal planar objects, like table tops. I do five of those, looking downward, to the four corners of a square and the center. Even that isn't airtight. It can miss narrow objects like railings. And then there are some bugs related to objects with degenerate triangles in the collision model. Incidentally, the documentation for llCastRay says you don't get hits reported from the object you're casting from. This is only true if the object is convex. The real check is that you only get hits reported when you hit the outside face of something. If you manage to get entirely inside an object, llCastRay, like the rest of the system, can't see it.

I went to Kitten's skybox, which is around 3900m altitude. I could not get pathfinding to move anything, for even my little Come Here test object. Pathfinding does seem to be on for the region. Are there any known problems with pathfinding at high altitude?

Is the platform surface marked as walkable. By default, Linden ground is walkable, but nothing you create is walkable by default. If pathfinding is disabled (rarely seen on mainland) an icon with a squggle superimposed a red "do not enter" symbol wlll appear on the top toolbar.

It's hard to tell from that what the problem is. If you have some terrain of your own on top of Linden ground, it has to be set as "Walkable" in Build->Pathfinding. Few people know how to set up SL pathfinding properly, which is why I don't sell my NPCs. Takes too much support effort. Documentation is terrible. Two little known facts: 1) if you set "Static obstacle" or "Walkable" for a linkset, all moving parts of the linkset are frozen in place. Including doors. 2) "Walkable" means "Walkable if up to 60 degree slope, then static obstacle", which is very convenient. I have a JIRA in on #1; it's been accepted, but, of course, not fixed. Anyway. I have two tools which can help with setup, "Come Here" and "Amulet of Pathfinding". These are both on Marketplace, cheap. "Come Here" is just a prim set up for pathfinding. You rez it, click on it, and it tries to come to you, displaying any errors. If Come Here won't move, work on the pathfinding properties of the surface underneath. "Amulet of Pathfinding" is a wearable amulet for examining pathfinding properties of objects. Worn on the left wrist. Click on it to turn it on; it glows when on, like any self-respecting magic item. Then go into mouselook and click on ground locations. It does an LLCast Ray and reports the objects hit by the ray and their pathfinding status. It ends with "CAN walk here" or "CANNOT walk here". This is useful when setting up pathfinding. In general, SL pathfinding only works well when you have a lot of open space, the pathfinding object moves slowly, and the sim isn't overloaded. Outdoor grazing animals, yes; waitress in crowded club, no.

I'd like to see the water connection between Belli and Sansara improved. You can get to Sansara, but by water, you can't get very far before you reach an obstacle. A few more water sims to the west, to make a connection to Sansara's river system, would help finish the job.

OK. It's always hard to tell who's advertising what how hard to whom. Who and where you are affects search results strongly. I'm never logged into Google or Microsoft, so I see the default results. Still, compare the landing pages of IMVU and SL. Boring old IMVU has upped their game.

IMVU pitch: "Avoid FOMO and Get It!" This is what some people get searching for Second Life. IMVU's landing page is cooler than SL's landing page. Second Life's landing page now requires a full signup, including date of birth, permission to spam, and a CAPCHA, to find out anything about Second Life. The marketing funnel is upside down. No wonder we see so few new users at the new user entry points.