animats

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.

I have a free flight feather I got at some disused college sim. Don't have a landmark for where to get it, though.

Get on a vehicle. There's an F-16 on Marketplace, and it maxes out around 130m/sec. At one region crossing every 2 seconds, something usually breaks within a few minutes, but it does work. For road travel, it's quite possible to drive 30m/sec on Linden roads, and faster on long straightaways. You have to do some things to increase vehicle downforce, as in real life.

That's what Oz told me two years ago, when I said I wished I'd been here on the way up instead of on the way down.

LL did a special viewer that supported streaming for some special event. Did that go into the mainstream viewer yet? That's what you need.

Interesting. From those messages, the connection to the login URL, the first connection you make to SL at startup, timed out. When you can't get SL to connect, try to connect to "login.agni.lindenlab.com" with a browser. You should get "FORBIDDEN", because you're not sending a username and password. If that times out, it's not anything viewer-related.

If you're just storing a large number of fixed strings, you can put them in a notecard, or multiple notecards. Notecards are random access; if you know the line number you want, you can get just that line.

I think that Oz said recently you can now purchase land from Linden Lab directly again. It's not yet automated; you have to contact Support. There are essentially unlimited isolated sims available from LL now. That was part of the purpose of moving everything to Amazon Web Services - ease of adding more capacity. Before, LL was out of space in their data center in Arizona.

Sculpts have prim params, but most of them are blanked out in the edit dialog. "Taper" has values, but they're not changeable. Was it ever possible to apply prim params, other than scale, to sculpts? I was looking at the viewer code, and I see remnants of support for that. Was warping a sculpt ever a thing in SL?

To some extent, that's true. SL is doing well from the perspective of long-time SL users. But it would be laughed off Steam as too buggy. As Sansar was. This is a big problem in retaining new users, who see SL as broken. What's badly broken right now? Group messaging. If you're going to be an online social network, messaging has to work reliably. Region crossings, about which I've said much in the past and won't repeat myself. Content loading stalls, seen in world as things taking way too long to appear. I suspect throttling by the Akamai content delivery network. Voice is still unreliable. EEP made the mainland world too dim, due to some bad defaults, and that hasn't been fixed yet. Those are the big ones, and they should be LL's priorities for Q1 2021. What else? Server uptime is pretty good, and was maintained through the transition to AWS. That's an achievement, considering how much state is being maintained server side.

This is why everybody in graphics uses a homogeneous representation of rotations. No special cases at zero degrees. In Second Life, that's quaternions. The key idea here is that you can multiply LSL rotations to get a new rotation. So, compute the rotation quaternion for the change you want to make using llEulerToQuat, then multiply the object's old rotation (from llGetRotation or llGetLinkPrimitiveParams) by the quaternion for the change to get the object's new rotation. Then apply that to the object with llSetRotation or llSetLinkPrimitiveParams. Ref: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Rotation This area is confusing but well documented. If you just want to spin something, see the functions which mention "Omega".

LSL has a parser for JSON. If you can make your site emit JSON, that's easier to deal with than trying to parse HTML yourself in LSL. What you're trying to do is quite possible, but more work than necessary. LSL also has something for parsing comma-separated values. Web pages don't have to be HTML. They can be text/text or text/json, as well as text/html. There are lots of resources available about making web sites do what you want. In general, it's better to make a web site that talks easily to LSL than making LSL to talk to an existing web site. LSL has severe memory and compute limitations, and the language is not well suited to parsing.

Lots of them. Many Japanese sims, from modern to classical. A Korean continent, although it's become more diverse. There's even a 1960s Vietnam War sim.