animats

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.

Something on the bio side, probably. Life extension, maybe.

Ouch. LL must have put 100-200 person-years into Sansar. Imagine what SL could be like with that much effort.

That's not unusual after a leveraged buyout. This tells us more about the new ownership. Watch what they do, not what they say.

UE4 was looked at, but it didn't look promising. Too much of UE4's performance depends on preprocessing the content with UE4's offline tools. UE5, though, is supposed to be able to deal with high-poly content better. That comes out later this year.

We're confusing the new user. Someone is having a specific problem with Windows 10 and the Radeon driver. It's not obvious what's wrong; other graphical stuff is running OK, but Firestorm won't start. He needs help from someone with Firestorm on Windows expertise.

If the simulation cheats like that, there will be artifacts. Although, if you're inside, and can't detect simulation time being slowed down while something coming into view is fast-forwarded to catch up...

Probably not. There's too much space and too much unnecessary fine detail at the subatomic level.

Try Firestorm support. https://www.firestormviewer.org/support/ If you can run The Valley, graphics is working.

"Request has expired" on both of those. Try a different image hosting service, please.

Server side is mostly single thread. It doesn't inherently have to be, but it's 20 year old technology. There are ways to architect around this. See Spatial OS, from Improbable. Doing it cost-effectively is tough, though. All three free to play big-world games on Spatial OS shut down because they were too expensive to run. A more technical view: You can sort of see from the performance problems what's wrong server side. Most CPU consumption is script time. Much of that is just the 3us per frame wasted on each script that's doing nothing. 5000 idle scripts in a sim and you're out of script time. Scripts could potentially be run in parallel on multiple CPUs. LSL's API has the interesting property that most calls request either get data or put data, but don't do both. The ones that do usually involve a delay. Someone was thinking ahead when they designed that.That allows more concurrency. The way this would be done is that all scripts read the state at the beginning of the frame. All the world state changes a script makes would be accumulated in a queue and applied all at once, after all scripts for the frame have run. If a script does a set followed by a synchronous get, it has to lose a turn and wait one frame. That eliminates most locking problems. The other big bottleneck is that when an avatar enters a sim, there's a huge transient load that lasts seconds. Go to a big shopping event and open the performance window and the nearby users window. Watch the performance hit as new avatars enter. This is what causes super-slow walking in busy sims. Why this is the case I don't know.

Someone did that for a big one-time event a few years ago. They had the whole build inverted under the ground, and you could see it in water. With some effort, it can be faked with projectors.

This is an artifact of Second Life not having physically based rendering. Second Life has an ambient color and a specular color. The effect of both is added. This can push light output past 100% reflective into Full Bright territory. You can get more light out than the lights are putting in. I've had troubles with this on chromed bike parts. In a PBR system, you have albedo (overall reflectiveness) and roughness. Roughness = 1.0 has no specular reflection, and the object will have the same brightness regardless of viewing angle and surface normal. Roughness = 0.0 is all specular reflection - totally shiny at the light reflection angle, dead black at all other angles. You never get out more light than you put in. So, in SL, if you have both ambient and specular layers, turn down the color slider grey level until you're no longer hitting saturated white.

OK. Here's a good test for graphics. The Valley is a test and benchmark for Epic's Unreal Engine 4. You download it and run it, and it shows you a nice forest valley. It looks like a game, but nothing happens except the viewpoint moving around to give you a tour. Start it up and let it run for an hour. It uses CPU, RAM, and the graphics card very heavily. If it runs for an hour with no failures, your computer is fine. If it fails, your computer needs maintenance.

Most new user places have official dressing rooms. New Resident Island has some. Firestorm Island has some. Oxbridge Caledon has some near the main lecture hall, and they have one-way glass; you can look out at Caledon but no one can see in.

SL will now play live streaming video (this is recent). So you can all watch the same live stream. For a while I had a screen at my place which showed a live webcam somewhere in RL. You can't play content that needs Digital Rights Management in SL, because Google Chromium (the open source version of Chrome and the browser inside the viewer) does not support that. That's intentional on Google's part. (DRM politics - long story.). So, no Netflix group viewing. You could use a video streaming service to run your own content through a streaming server and back out to users. But video streaming services start around US$40/month and go up from there. Way up. If it weren't so expensive, performers and DJs in SL would do it, because they could have giant screens with close-ups of their own performance. You could create a web page which, when you loaded it, started a playlist at a specific point. So you could have a Youtube movie show that started at 8 PM, and anyone who started it would get a URL generated with the number of seconds after 8 PM as the starting point, putting them in sync with everyone else. That's ordinary web programming, and not too hard. Then you have a SL screen that starts from the URL of that web page, and you're in business. Someone with a movie theater in SL ought to do this. There are theaters in SL, but most don't work.

You can load files with the uploader but not upload them to Second Life. The Firestorm viewer lets you resize the viewing window, so you can enlarge it and see what you're uploading. You get land impact information from the uploader.

A big limitation of animesh is that they can't "sit". That is, they can't use the animations of another object. They can only use their own built-in animations. So it's hard to do this in a general way. (I've given some thought to a pseudo-sit system where messages are exchanged between animesh NPC and suitably equipped objects. Something along the lines of "NPC to chair - want to sit there, send sit target info and animation", and the chair sends back "Sit at <x,y,z> rot <x,y,z,w>, run anim with UUID nnn." Unfortunately, while you can apply to an object any texture for which you know the UUID, you can't do the same thing for animations. So loaning an animesh NPC a texture so it can sit like an avatar is not currently possible.)

The scale of this problem will be much reduced in 12 hours and 11 minutes.

If you strictly obey the parcel boundaries, you get ugly edges like this. It's common to build bits of driveway to connect your parcel to an adjacent Linden road. In some areas, all the parcels are multiples of 512m, but not rectangular. Urban parcels in Zindra often have small 4x8m corner cutouts of Linden land. Usually you need to stick something there to avoid a hole in the ground. Grass, paving, planters, whatever matches the adjacent land all seem to be acceptable. (There's a Linden-made Zindra Corner Planter, which can be obtained from a dispenser in the mall in Mosh. Some places, the moles put one in, and other places, a landowner put one in.) A corner in Kama City, Zindra. Each corner lot has a 4x8m cutout that's Linden owned, to make the parcel an exact multiple of 512m^2. Clockwise from top left, Zindra corner planter by Abnor Mole, hole in ground surrounded by concrete, cobblestone pavement extending over cutout to match sidewalk level, and vacant lot of Linden grass about 0.5m below grade. These change from time to time. Last month there was a club at the lower left, and they had pavement there. It's like being stuck with responsibility for a little strip of land between the sidewalk and curb in real life. In some jurisdictions, the city owns it, but you can plant grass or pave there. Building a structure there is out, though. (Looking at nearby lots, about half of Kama City is owned by a few big landlords who put filler buildings on the lots. Asking prices are excessive and the parcels are not selling or renting.)

Anybody ever use any of those weird modes? "Circle2" generates strange very jaggy objects. That's not accidental; there's code in the viewer to do that. I asked one of SL's major creators of plants and trees if that was used for something, but no. Is this just a debug feature that was accidentally exposed to users?