animats

Strawberry Linden has been writing up luxury hotels in Second Life. Here is something less expensive. On Route 8 in Satori. Motel, gas station, burger stand. 45 minutes of free parking and a rez zone. The gas station gives out free maps of Satori. Clean rooms. The bed has a full sex roleplay sequence, The TV doesn't work, but the microwave does. Massage, L$1. Makes a buzzing noise for one minute. It's worth it for the authenticity. This place is tacky in extreme detail. Motel office There's a little town main street behind the motel, with a hotel, liquor store, pawn shop, barber, and tattoo parlor. They're all highly detailed, and many items work. The barber shop has a hair vendor, and the tattoo shop has a tattoo vendor. There's a fallout shelter under the tattoo shop and a rock band practices down there. It's a very well executed bit of mid 20th century roadside America. There are other cheap hotels on Route 8. Diners, truck stops, gas stations, GTFO hubs, and a drive in theater (sadly, the screen doesn't do anything) are nearby.

Yes. My own vehicles, which have extensive workarounds in their LSL programming to recover from those issues, are doing fine. I can take one of my bikes around Robin Loop at 60kph with a forced 300ms network lag without problems. (Normally I'll drive that at 100kph, but with 300ms lag, it's too hard to stay on the road.) I've discussed the technical issues around this before, so I won't repeat that. Most of the serious problems are related to double region crossings. SL needs code sim-side to totally prevent a second region crossing starting until the previous one has been completed. If you start a second crossing before the first is 100% complete, something will break. Vehicles and drivers can try to prevent this by slowing down, but it will only be airtight if done sim-side. Users and scripts cannot always stop soon enough, and cannot always tell if the crossing is 100% complete. I've made this point for years now, filed JIRAs, made videos demonstrating how to reproduce the problem, and brought it up at many Server User Group meetings. I hate to have to keep harping on this, but read the messages above. This is losing SL users outside the US. SL will hold together reasonably well with 300ms network delay, except for double region crossings. It's a bit sluggish, but not that bad unless you're driving fast. There are two region corners on Robin Loop roads in Heterocera, so it's a good place to test.

Yes, that's a problem. Reproduced by adding 300ms of delay to the network connection and driving a demo car from Manji Automotive Factory in Burns around Robin Loop. The vehicle did not recover, even after about 8 more region crossings. Latest release of Firestorm, 6.4.12, 64-bit, on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS.

Ugh. I just fixed my store. I only have 16 items, and had to edit each one separately. People with thousands of items should be beating on LL about this.

Nowhere enough prims per region for Dubai's towers.

SL needs an Emergency Clothing Repair Center. Someplace staffed by volunteers, where people really into clothing help users fix such problems. New Resident Island, Firestorm Help Islands, and Caledon Oxbridge are often helpful, but much of the time, there are no official helpers at any of those places. Or the people there may not be clothing experts. Surround the Repair Center with clothing shops. To have a shop there, you have to serve some number of hours per month as a helper. Or have a Repair Center in a fashion mall, as a traffic builder. (The idea comes from cosplay conventions, which often have an Emergency Cosplay Repair Center, staffed by volunteer costumers with sewing machines, hot glue guns, safety pins, and staplers.)

I think you're right. I see that with my NPCs, who can ray cast hit their own clothing, but animesh have a different system. When animesh wear rigged mesh, it's a child prim, not an attachment.

That's a nice build. We need more big outdoor builds like that in SL. We have plenty of empty ocean, but not much sparsely built land. I'd like to see SL have some large areas of small town sims surrounded by open-space sims with vegetation and roads, but not much else. A forest area has a big edge in performance because it's mostly duplicate instances of a small number of different objects. Instances are cheap, and in more advanced systems, such as the UE5 demo, really cheap. There's one copy of the mesh and one copy of the texture in the GPU for all the instances of the same object. The GPU can then draw large numbers of the same object without much CPU intervention. Most games use instancing heavily, partly for performance and partly to reduce artist costs. Second Life tends not to do that. Your house might have a few identical chairs, but most items will only appear once. The house next door probably has very little content in common with yours. Neither textures nor meshes are re-used much between different creators. This results in a big loading cost and a need for more GPU memory. (How much GPU to require is a difficult problem for SL. But that's a different topic.)

Yes, you can do this with llCastRay. A few notes: Set RC_GET_ROOT_KEY in the DATA_FLAGS for llCastRay if you want to tell when the ray reached the avatar. That way, when the ray cast hit's the avatar's mesh clothing, you'll get the key of the avatar, not the key of the clothing attachment. Note that if the avatar is sitting, you'll get what they're sitting on. So you have to take that into account. When you find the avatar's key, get the root of that key, and that's "Hit the avatar or at least what they're sitting on or in". If you need to resolve avatar position inside a vehicle, where they are sitting on something that surrounds them, it's more complicated. But for most uses, comparing root keys is good enough. If you get RCERR_CAST_TIME_EXCEEDED or RCERR_SIM_PERF_LOW statuses, wait 0.1 second or so and try again. After 20 tries or so, give up. My NPCs do huge numbers of ray casts as they find their way through their surroundings, and they hit the ray cast limits now and then. It slows them down but doesn't stop them. If you cast a ray outwards from your own avatar, you can get a hit on your own attachments or seat. So you may have to ask for the first 2 or 3 hits, and ignore any which have the same root the caster does.

There's are intermittent "fail to connect to sim" bugs that crop up in various contexts. This shows up as teleport fails, standing at an edge of the world and the next sim not appearing, being able to look into a sim but not walk in, and getting 10 seconds of extra delay at each sim crossing. Is this a mainland sim? Can you go to an adjacent sim and look in?

Yes. I consider that a bug. SL feels too sluggish, which is a technical problem. I've written on that previously. I have a topic on these forums, "The Metaverse and All That", where I post news items about big virtual worlds. There's interest and money. Almost a hundred have been built. Ryan Schultz has a list on his blog. We're still a long way from Snow Crash and Ready Player One. Metaverses come in several flavors. First, there's VR or not VR. Right now, to get the frame rate for VR on affordable headgear, you have to bring the content down to low-rez cartoon level and keep the scene size small. So VR worlds are kind of limited. VRchat is probably the best. Facebook keeps trying to get a hit in this space, but Facebook Spaces was a flop and Facebook Horizon does not seem to be catching on. Then there's the question of how much building the system allows users. The biggest open world systems are voxel-based, like Legos. Roblox, after over a decade, has become huge. Dual Universe is an interplanetary scale voxel based system. Luca, who's well known on SL, went over there and live-streamed two months of work. It's a grinding game. She started out collecting rocks to get materials. After two months of hard work, many hours a day, she was up to "Fur Admiral Luca", with a fleet of carriers filled with small craft, bases, and large mining operations. Then the Dual Universe management changed the rules and the users are screaming. Then there are the "Make Money Fast" systems - Decentraland and Sominium Space. These are tied to the Etherium blockchain and are really cryptocurrency speculation schemes with a virtual world attached to make their token a "utility token" to evade SEC oversight. It's possible to go in world with both systems, but few people do. There are the game level loaders - you build a game level offline, upload it, and people can go visit. Sansar, High Fidelity, and Sinespace are in this category. Mostly, they're boring. You visit once, see what's there, and don't return. Sansar had a Star Wars prop museum and a Ready Player One prop museum. Visit once and you're done. Fortnite has something similar, allowing people to add Fortnite levels, but it's not a major part of the game. For a while, it looked like the Spatial OS system from Improbable was going to make big open-world games easier to make. But it turns out that system is too expensive to run. You have to host on Google and pay for every object and action. Three fairly good indy games shut down because the operating cost was too high. You can't afford to host free to play that way. Sweeney, of Epic, keeps making Metaverse noises, but so far all that's come out are some modest add-ons to Fortnite. Fortnite is sharded; thousands of copies of a little world, not one big one. SL is actually in good shape. Based on average concurrent users, it ranks about even with GTA V Online, which hovers around 12th place on Steam. But GTA V Online gets all the publicity. SL's big onboarding problems are well known. 1) the new user experience sucks, 2) it's too sluggish, 3) "What do I do now?" 4) fear and censorship of a world that has sex. It's up to LL marketing to overcome those. Not seeing much happening.

Make the popsicle from a prim. You can then change its length by using the prim properties to trim off the end under script control. To practice, rez a cylinder and go to the Object tab in edit. Try adjusting the prim properties and see what happens.

There are several sims of modern Japan built by Japanese people. They look fine, but are not heavily used. There's Mopire, four sims modeled after a part of Tokyo, with tall buildings, highway ramps, and subways. There's a modern Japanese suburb, small houses and apartments built around a railroad station. SL is forced to suburbia by its density problem. SL works best with less than 20 avatars per sim. More than that, and both servers and viewers start to choke. So heavily utilized urban areas don't work very well. You can build them, but if they fill up, they won't work. Mopire would overload at 1% of its real-world population density.

Puppeteering got far enough that there was a development release? I did not know that. Talk to Lucia Nightfire. This is a big issue for her, too. I'd like to see webcam- based face feature tracking supported in SL. The better avatars have the ability to display facial expressions, but you have to run them from a big panel of 70 or so buttons, which few are skilled enough to do. Machima makers, entertainers, and Youtubers would go for that. Few would send, but many would watch.

Bellissaria is banal suburbia, but many people like banal suburbia. My main location is a cafe, workshop, and builders yard in Kama City. That belongs in a working city. I also have a small house In Bellessaria, set up as a beach house, with a boat and surfboards outside. Mostly because I had some unused tier, so it was free. Incidentally, someone just set up a cute Santa's Workshop in Kama Center sim, next to the monument park. Although in an adult area, that Santa's Workshop is not sex-oriented. Neither is my place, for that matter.

I went there too, and the region seems OK. It's an old Linden Home region. If the viewer crashes, it's not your fault. If it happens in Firestorm, try the Firestorm support group. Save the Firestorm.log file if possible.

I haven't had much trouble in a while. I have a cafe, motorcycle shop, and builder's yard in Kama City in Zindra. My main neighbor has an area which looks like a part of Baltimore. I have some waist height fences and walls, but no more than that. Big walls are rare in Zindra, although one place on the same sim has one big tan surface for no good reason. Its owner is never home. My favorite unnecessary wall: A wall with a picture of a forest, to hide a forest. Near Caletta. If you want a backdrop, get some isolated parcel from one of the landlords that rents them. Look at the SL map (when it gets fixed) for areas that look like checkerboards. You can rent a little box in an area of little boxes. Don't clutter up mainland.

Luxury convertible! Be the envy of your friends in the 'hood.

It could be done with modern technology. Maybe you don't get to take your inventory, but on arrival in the new system, you get the closest visual match from items in your inventory. Like font substitution, where, if you don't have the exact font, one that looks similar is used. CasperVend supports selling items in a way that supports multiple grids. Few use it, but the system is in place. Kitely has that, too. An important feature is to allow a party to cross as a group, so you and your friends can visit a different metaverse. (SL ought to have this in world. Fortnite has it.) With RLV and some viewer support, that could work. So it's quite possible to implement crossing between mostly disconnected systems.

Oh, those are nice builds. Sad to lose them.

One approach would be to have User and Creator modes. In User mode, you have a clean screen, with very little 2D user interface. Switch to Creator mode, the 3D pane shrinks and toolbars appear around the 3D window.

That's correct. The LL viewer has its own networking system, its own marshaling system (three of them, no less), its own database system, its own rendering system, its own HTTP system, its own cache system, its own 2D user interface system, its own futures system, its own math library... Most of those things are off the shelf parts today. They weren't 20 years ago. UE4 wouldn't help much. UE4 is all about preprocessing content when building a game level. UE5, maybe. It does more at run-time. Their LOD and animation engines are very interesting. We'll know more around mid-2021. I wonder what those were. Inside the viewer code are special cases for "Demon", "Bird", and "Rock". Those, like Linden trees, are built-in objects. I wonder if any still exist in world.

We must have 64-bit integers before 2038, or time will wrap around.

The upper limit of LSL is rather low. After spending a year cramming an entire NPC system into LSL, I have to say it took about 3x as long as in a more reasonable programming language. The language itself isn't that bad. Structs and arrays would be nice. The lack of memory space, and in particular being able to run out of stack unexpectedly, was the biggest headache. You can track your heap usage and avoid allocations when tight, but there's less control over stack usage. A big incoming message or system call return can blow the stack. This is a big problem for scripts doing something highly dynamic. I'd like to have stack space not counted against the 64K limit. When a script is not processing an event, the stack is empty. It's only transient usage, so you're not using much sim resources with the stack. Some reasonable limit to prevent runaway recursion, such as 64KB of stack in addition to code and data, would be fine. Lucia has many useful comments about the SL API, which is a separate issue from the language. How much you should be able to do from LSL, and how fast, is a complex issue. LSL is only semi real time. With script overload the new normal, it's hard to do real time anything from LSL. The trick that makes my NPCs work is assuming script performance will be poor, and computing all moves just before they start. All their motion is keyframe animation, planned a few seconds before it's executed. If you see one of my NPCs with its arms folded, the planner, written in LSL, is computing busily, trying to get enough CPU time to find a path for the next move. On a lightly loaded sim, movement is continuous. Built-in pathfinding works great in an empty sandbox. This is a LL video from 9 years ago. All the right concepts, but not enough CPU power to make it go. Built-in SL pathfinding is making steering corrections in real time, and totally falls apart under overload. It will overshoot and hit things because the steering corrections have fallen behind. SL pathfinding will work at slow speeds in open spaces, but it's hopeless in tight spots or at high speed. This is what LL pathfinding looks like in an overloaded sim. This is why we can't have highly dynamic scripted objects grid-wide no matter what calls LSL has.

Neither were email, or SMS messages, or Twitter, or Facebook. Your users tell you what your product is for by how they use it. That's what success looks like. Vendors must accept that, or go under. It's embarrassing that Second Life, a social system, can't do either text chat or voice chat reliably. (I once went to a talk at Stanford by one of the architects of Facebook. The original concept was that it was for college students, and it was expected that most traffic would be within a single college, with little national or worldwide traffic. The first version of the system assumed that traffic pattern and was based on regional servers. When it turned out they had far more long-distance traffic than expected, they had to do a total redesign. It worked.)