animats

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?

Many people have tried, without much success. There's been much activity in the last few years. There was the era of the "game level loaders" - creators build their own "game level", upload, and others can go visit. Sansar, High Fidelity, and SineSpace are all in that category. It failed abysmally. None of those were able to average more than about 20-50 concurrent users. (SL runs about 30,000 to 50,000 average concurrent users. For reference, GTA V Online is slightly above that.) So that was a dead end. Then there were the VR-first worlds. Facebook tried hard at this. Facebook Rooms (failed), Facebook Spaces (failed), and Facebook Horizon (live, but not taking off.) VRChat usage seems to be flat. VRChat has a good implementation, so the technology doesn't seem to be the obstacle. Lesson: throwing money at this does not guarantee success. There are the cyptocurrency worlds, Decentraland, Sominium Space, and Upland. Mostly, people trade land hoping to get rich, and don't go in-world much. Upland didn' t bother to build a virtual world at all. Upland uses Tilia for their connection to real-world money. There are the voxel worlds, Roblox and Dual Universe. These are doing OK. They're not as good looking as SL, especially on the avatar side. Roblox, after over a decade, finally took off. Lesson: it takes a long time to reach critical mass in a system where the users make the content. Dual Universe is a multi-planet system with both space travel and ground activity. You pay by the month, but there are no land charges. Imagine SL where, to get prims, you had to go to big open spaces and dig for them. They started with empty planets and waited to see what happened. Users were supposed to seek, mine, and trade. But they made it too much like real life. Users could build up huge mechanized mining complexes and extract resources in large quantities. So they changed the rules to prevent that, adding some totally arbitrary restrictions. This infuriated the users who'd been building. SL's Luca Grabacr has been active there and has videos on YouTube about that issue. There were the Spatial OS worlds. Spatial OS, from Improbable, is a system built at great cost to support very large seamless worlds. It looked like the technical solution to many of SL's problems. But it's very expensive to run, and the first three big games built on it have already shut down. One game from China, Nostos, is still up. Artwork is great, gamers report they can clear the game in three hours and then are done. The trouble with really big professionally created worlds is that you need a huge team to create them and budgets the size of a major action film. A virtual world needs a large number of good creators and active residents to work. It's very, very difficult to get that from a cold start. Even throwing a half billion dollars at the problem, as Improbable and Facebook did, does not guarantee success. Second Life's main asset is that it has that. The world has to progress, or people get bored and leave.

Seraph CIty - before my time in SL. Closed in 2014. It's a good idea, but a tough sell. It would be good to see something like that again. Pictures of that region can be found. Might yield some ideas. There's some art deco on Marketplace, but most of it is old stuff from the prim era, and too boxy.

Interpolate along the Bezier curve in the usual way to get the point. Then use SLERP to interpolate the rotation.

This is what you want.

.OBJ is a 3D model. Photoshop is for 2D images. Are you looking for the templates for making texture clothing?

My vendor sales are way up and my Marketplace sales are down. Are others seeing this?

I wonder if there's something in LInden homes that can break. I have two windowshades that will no longer respond to clicks. The main control panel can still open and close all of them at once, but they don't respond individually.

Well, the Next Big Thing getting venture capital is "virtual friends". “There are about 86 million Gen Z people today, and I feel that in five years, most or all of them will have a virtual being as a close friend. They’ll share gossip, secrets, have conversations every day. Some of your friends in the Metaverse will be real people, and some will be what we would have called, a few years ago, NPCs, But we’re all avatars, some of us powered by AI and some of us by blood and guts. The Metaverse will be filled with these characters. A virtual being should be able to play with you in Roblox, in Fortnite, be on Instagram and TikTok, text with you and video chat and call and all the rest,” he says. “The characters transcend the game.” This is from a VentureBeat conference later this month. Superintelligent NPCs are still a bit out of reach, but consider how far Alexa and Siri have come. What they seem to have in mind initially is an interaction level comparable to fans writing to a YouTuber. That's chatbot-level, and achievable. Automated Instagrammers are a thing: https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/ That's really not much better graphically than SL, except that they have a better renderer that can do skin properly. (The trick is having a subsurface scattering layer in a physically based renderer. Without that, skin is either too flat or too glossy.) I once started working on a machine learning based NPC for SL, but SL doesn't have enough traffic. It would take thousands of interactions per day to train the smarter chatbots. The same situations have to come up many times so the classifier has something to work on.

The big world. Most games feel cramped. After a while, you've seen everything. SL is big enough that takes a few years.

Perhaps the dev team had a budget cut with the new ownership. The Linden Lab jobs page previously had some technical job postings for server-side engineers. Those are gone, but we haven't seen any new server-side Lindens. Instead, the jobs page has only a technical job for Tilia ("Here on the Ecom engineering team, we accomplish this by building a growing set of financial capabilities on top of our regulatory licenses. Some of these capabilities include processing payments and payouts, verifying user identities, detecting fraud and enforcing sanctions") and an entry level customer support position. I asked about this at Server User Group, and got a meaningless answer.

If this is for Open Simulator, see https://opensim.vivox.com/opensim/ If this is for your own game, and you can wait for them to get it working, highfidelity.com (founded by the creator of Second Life) is coming out with what they claim will be better spatial audio.

Me too. The technology is here to build a metaverse. SL comes closest. It's just too sluggish. Technically, we know how to solve every problem except large numbers of avatars in a small area.

I'm surprised that, after all this time, Tilia, which claims to be a money transfer company, doesn't have full banking relationships. By now they should be plugged into bank-level systems such as ACH and SEPA at least, rather than needing second-tier services like PayPal and Skrill.

Removing "Wear" for attach points that don't really map to a body part, such as "Center", would be a good move.

SL needs a new viewer to do that. The existing ones are mostly single thread and do not use modern GPUs fully.

The only real asset Linden Lab has it is its users and creators. The viewer is open source and others have implemented viewers. The server has been duplicated as Open Simulator. The really smart people who developed the system are all gone. LL doesn't even own their servers any more. All LL has left is a solid base of reasonably happy users. It's worth reminding LL management of this now and then.

I'm not quite seeing it either. Projectors normally track the motion of the object to what they are attached quite well. Most vehicle headlights are projectors, and they reliably point where the vehicle is pointed. LLTargetOmega is for spinning things where you're not that concerned about exact position. Use it for propellers, wheels, and decorative spinning objects. It's usually all viewer side and doesn't load down the sim. If you need more controlled rotation, I'd suggest using keyframe animation. That's a combination of server side and viewer side, and will get you smooth motion. A script frantically updating angles many times per second is the least efficient approach, but will work. By the way, an SL light has four parts: The projection or emission of light from the object. This lights other objects, but not the light source. The color of the face emitting the light. This is often just full bright. Glow. A little glow around a light looks good, but don't overdo. About 0.02 is good for most lights. The visible light cone. That's a separate object, usually translucent and full bright. Textures can give it a nice falloff effect. Each of those has to be set up separately. But if all are attached to the same object, they should stay in sync.

Streaming video in SL! Live traffic camera at Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. This is just a plain prim where I set the media URL for one face. For Youtube streams, you want the URL in the "embed" code. That's just the video, not the whole webpage. This one is https://www.youtube.com/embed/lkIJYc4UH60. Lots of potential here. Clubs, performances, etc. If you have your own streaming server you can set things up so that everyone sees the same thing.